CASL: A declarative domain specific language for modeling Complex Adaptive Systems

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are ubiquitous across many domains, such as social networks, supply chains, and smart cities. Currently, the modeling and analysis of CAS relies on adapting techniques used for multi-agent simulation, an approach which lacks several features crucial to CAS modeling, such as agents comprised of other agents, and considering methods for adaptation. Moreover, many existing approaches do not scale well, thus making them difficult to employ in analyzing realistic scenarios. In this paper, we propose the Complex Adaptive System Language (CASL), a declarative language that is able to capture the salient features of CAS while being general enough to be used across multiple domains. CASL facilitates the construction of complex models and our code generation method allows CASL models to be executed on a variety of platforms. We demonstrate the flexibility of CASL by implementing three distinct models, which are then executed using Repast.