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What are some good tools for designing & modeling complex systems?
I’ll leave the question open to some interpretation, to allow for a variety of answers.
Complex System:
A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.
– [Wikipedia – Complex Systems]
Unless you are fluent in writing discrete-event simulation code, or you have a particular subject-matter area for which there exists domain-specific simulation libraries, i would strongly suggest NetLogo.
NetLogo is a platform for Agent-based simulation; the term also describes the DSL used in this platform. Aside from the documentation supplied in NetLogo itself, Seth Tisue and Uri Wilensky have written an excellent introduction to NetLogo.
NetLogo is widely used among the community of Agent-Based modelers–for instance, it was featured in a 2010 Conference Proceedings paper titled Software Tools for Analysis and Modelling in Complex Systems. (The link to the paper is here–careful it’s a direct link to the pdf file).
Over the past decade, NetLogo has been used in a large variety of practical applications, including Financial Markets, Clinical Medicine, Network Architecture and Diagnostics, and Traffic Simulation.
A few facts about NetLogo:
a GUI-driven integrated simulation
environment
free and open source
stable and mature (development began
in 1999)
actively supported (by Northwestern University, for coursework use)
excellent and large body of
documentation
many working code examples (complete
models) are bundled with the base install of NetLogo
To me, the last bullet was the most compelling reason to try NetLogo–this large and diverse library of pre-built, complete simulations meant a relatively painless learning path. In addition, these served as a valuable library of template models from which i could select a few and modify rather than starting from a blank page.