The EURACE Project
An agent-based software platform for European economic policy
design with heterogeneous interacting agents: new insights from a
bottom up approach to economic modelling and simulation.
Start date: 1st September 2006
End date: 31st August 2009
Links
Papers and articles
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Description of the EURACE Project (2006-2009)
The original project description.
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Modelling Requirements for EURACE,
EURACE Deliverable 2.1a (original version), Christophe Deissenberg and Sander van der Hoog, October 1, 2007:
This paper gives the general background. It is a broad-based literature survey of agent-based modelling, reviewing all the elements we felt were important to include in the FLAME framework (different interaction mechanisms, various market protocols and designs, network structures, etc.)
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Modelling Specifications for EURACE
EURACE Deliverable 2.1b (original version), Christophe Deissenberg and Sander van der Hoog, October 1, 2007:
This paper gives more details on the modelling specifications, specifying what market mechanisms and interaction protocols we will be using within EURACE models.
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EURACE VisionDocument,
EURACE Consortium, 31 January, 2008:
This paper gives the methodological background for the modelling choices within EURACE. It was written after the 1st-year report.
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Modelling Guidelines for EURACE, Annotated Deliverable 2.1 (revised version), Christophe Deissenberg and Sander van der Hoog, January 31, 2008:
These modelling guidelines provide motivations for many modelling choices, such as the spatio-temporal modelling, the choice of modelling multiple geographical levels, hierarchical design, parallelization of interaction mechanisms, and the scale and scope of economic activities.
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EURACE: A Massively Parallel Agent-Based Model of the European Economy,
Christophe Deissenberg, Sander van der Hoog and Herbert Dawid, 2008. Applied Mathematics and Computation 204 (2), 541-552.
Abstract: EURACE is a major European attempt to construct an agent-based model of the European economy with millions of autonomous, purposive agents interacting in a complicated economic environment. To create it, major advances are needed, in particular in terms of economic modeling and software engineering.
In this paper, we describe the general structure of the economic model developed for EURACE and present the Flexible Large-scale Agent Modelling Environment (FLAME) that will be used to describe the agents and run the model on massively parallel supercomputers. Illustrative simulations with a simplified model based on EURACE's labor market module are presented.
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Production and Finance in EURACE,
Sander van der Hoog, Christophe Deissenberg and Herbert Dawid, 2008, In: K. Schredelseker and F. Hauser (Eds.), Complexity and Artificial Markets, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems,
Springer, 147 - 158.
Abstract: After briefly presenting the main features
of EURACE, this paper describes in more detail the newly developed financial
management module that intermediates between the real and the financial spheres in
EURACE. In a nutshell, this module defines the link between the hiring and investment
behavior of the firms as a function of the revenues they obtain by selling their
products, of the money they can raise on the credit and financial markets, of their
dividend policy, and other major aspects of financial decision-making.
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EURACE - European agent-based computational economics using FLAME, Christopher Greenough, David Worth, Lee-Shawn Chin, Mike Holcombe and Simon Coakley.
Article about FLAME and EURACE in the bulletin of the Computational Science and Engineering Department at STFC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Summary of the project
Macroeconomic policy design plays a fundamental role in social welfare and requires a coordinated application of economic policy measures, e.g., fiscal and monetary strategies, knowledge exchange, R&D incentives etc.. Generally speaking, the interplay of such different measures is not completely understood and macroeconomic design follows a classical approach. Conversely, there is considerable interest in the development of an alternative paradigm to the rational representative agent model.
This project tackles this complex problem and proposes an innovative
approach to macroeconomic modelling and economic policy design within the
agent-based computational economics framework. The project objectives are
characterized by scientific, technological and societal scopes. From the
scientific point of view, the main effort regards the study and the development
of multi-agent models that reproduce, at the aggregate economic level, the
emergence of global features as a self-organized process from the complex
pattern of interactions among heterogeneous individuals.
The following two major scientific objectives can be identified:
- Establishing an innovative framework for the study of
the macroeconomy according to the agent-based computational approach.
- Providing new insights on the emergence of global regularities
in the aggregation of heterogeneous interacting agents.
From the technological point of view, the project will develop, with advanced
software engineering techniques, a software platform in order to realize
a powerful environment for large-scale agent-based economic simulations. Key
issues will be the definition of formal languages for modelling and for optimizing
code generation, the development of scalable computational simulation tools
and the standardization of data with easy to use human-machine interfaces.
The following two major technological objectives can be identified:
- Development of new software methodologies for implementing,
designing and validating large-scale agent-based economic simulations.
- Development of an agent-based software platform to perform
simulation experiments on economic policy design for the European Union.
From the social point of view, the agent-based software platform for the
simulation of the European economy will have an outstanding impact on the
economic policy design capabilities of the European Union. It will be a powerful
tool, enabling to perform what-if analysis, optimizing the impact
of regulatory decisions that will be quantitatively based on European economy
scenarios.
Project Partners:
- Università degli Studi di Genova (UG) Italy (Coordinator)
- Universitaet Bielefeld (UNIBI) Germany
- Université de la Méditerranée (GREQAM) France
- National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE) Turkey
- Università Politecnica della Marche (UPM) Italy
- University of Sheffield (USFD) UK
- Università degli Studi di Cagliari (UNICA) Italy
- CCLRC Computational Science & Engineering (CCLRC) UK
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Last updated: 10 September 2008
Sander van der Hoog