Ps-i version 2.0 manual
About Ps-i 2.0.
Ps-i is a computer program that allows a researcher to simulate a system
of agents and gather information about system's behaviour.
The second version of ps-i was created from scratch during summer of 1999.
This was done to alleviate extendability problems in the first version -
which core was derived from a mockup program and was not designed to make changes simple.
The design of Ps-i had the following goals in mind:
- the model implemented in the program should be changeable by end users
- 99% of the program's codebase should be shared between Windows and Linux (Unix) versions
- full functionality of the program should be available under Linux to facilitate fast development
- the featureset of the program should encompass the featureset of the first version.
To achieve these goals the following design decisions were made:
- the model description is external to the program and is contained in model configuration file
(usually with extension ".mdl")
- the user interface was implemented using Tcl/Tk library which allowed all of the code (except for two startup files) to
be shared between Linux (Unix) and Windows versions
- the core of the model consists of the library of functions and the data related to the model being
currently run; the dependencies between library functions are weak - that is they are due to the particular
form of the data structures and not the algorithms implemented in the model.
Ps-i 2.0 - model configuration file.
The model file consists of the following sections:
It is generally recommended that a novice user takes an existing configuration file and use it as a template
for constructing description of his/her model.