The CENKI space economic simulator: Analytical verification of an agent-based modeling engine

This work introduces the Committee for Expansion into Key Space Industries' (CENKI) Space Economic Simulator (SES) version Alpha 2.0: an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework to emulate a space economy. The SES approaches the quantization of a space economic system as a set of players with various agents which interact through an efficient marketplace architecture. Players can range from companies, to policy makers, to space resources such as asteroids. Agent-agent interactions are governed by a publish/subscribe messaging system, which allows for a high degree of scalability and flexibility. This approach allows each agent to pursue individual aims, provides the ability to handle large quantities of agents, and offers a coding implementation which is agnostic to the addition or subtraction of other agents. In this paper, the functionality of the SES in modeling agent-agent interactions is verified against analytical benchmarks. Simple scenarios, which are prototypes for more complex scenarios likely to be of interest to space economic modelers, are constructed. The expected outcomes of these scenarios are derived analytically, and the scenarios are implemented in the SES to verify that the SES outputs match the analytical derivations. This shows that the process of designing and implementing more complex scenarios in the SES scales much more readily than the equivalent analytical process, and requires fewer restrictive assumptions.