Application of PAMS Collaboration Platform to Simulation-Based Researches in Soil Science: The Case of the MIcro-ORganism Project

Major researches in the domain of complex systems are interdisciplinary, collaborative and geographically distributed. The purpose of this paper is to explore a new collaborative approach that facilitates scientists' interactions during the modelling and simulation process. Based on the problem of collaboration in a simulation project, we identify the needs for this kind of platform. Accordingly, a new collaborative platform dedicated to agent-based simulation (PAMS) has been developed. This new environment integrates common collaborative tools (e.g. videoconferencing, instant messaging, whiteboard) and specific tools to share and manipulate models, simulators, experiments and results... In this paper, we illustrate our approach by presenting our experiment with MIOR, a model developed in soil science.