Developing Agent-Based Migration Models in Pairs

Developing a realistic agent-based model of human migration requires particular care. Committing too early to a specific model architecture, design, or language environment can later become costly in terms of the revisions required. To examine specifically the impact of differences in implementation, we have developed two instances of the same model in parallel. One model is realized in the programming language Julia, the underlying execution semantics is of a discrete stepwise stochastic process. The other is realized in an external domain-specific language ML3, based on a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) semantics. By developing models in pairs in different approaches, important properties of the target model can be more effectively revealed. In addition, the realization within a programming language and an external domain-specific modeling language respectively, helped identifying crucial features and trade-offs for the future implementation of the model and the design of the domain-specific modeling language.