Overview
The "agents" in ACE models can represent individuals (e.g. people), social groupings (e.g. firms), biological entities (e.g. growing crops), and/or physical systems (e.g. transport systems). The ACE modeler provides the initial configuration of a computational economic system comprising multiple interacting agents. The modeler then steps back to observe the development of the system over time without further intervention. In particular, system events should be driven by agent interactions without external imposition of equilibrium conditions. Issues include those common to experimental economics in general and development of a common framework for empirical validation and resolving open questions in agent-based modeling.
ACE is an officially designated special interest group (SIG) of the Society for Computational Economics. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute have contributed to the development of ACE.
Read more about this topic: Agent-based Computational Economics