Defining monitors and inspectors

Other outputs can be very useful to study better the behavior of your agents.

Index

• Define a monitor
• Define an inspector

Define a monitor

A monitor allows to follow the value of an arbitrary expression in GAML. It will appear, in the User Interface, in a small window on its own and be recomputed every time step (or according to its refresh facet).

Definition of a monitor:

monitor monitor_name value: an_expression refresh: boolean_statement;

with:

• value: mandatory, the expression whose value will be displayed by the monitor.
• refresh: bool statement, optional: the new value is computed if the bool statement returns true.

Example:

experiment my_experiment type: gui {
    output {
	monitor monitor_name value: cycle refresh: every(1#cycle);
    }
}

NB: you can also declare monitors during the simulation, by clicking on the button "Add new monitor", and specifying the name of the variable you want to follow.

Define an inspector

During the simulation, the user interface of GAMA provides the user the possibility to inspect an agent, or a group of agents. But you can also define the inspector you want directly from your model, as an output of the experiment.

Use the statement inspect to define your inspector, in the output scope of your GUI experiment. The inspector has to be named (using the facet name), a value has to be specified (with the value facet).

inspect "inspector_name" value: the_value_you_want_to_display;

Note that you can inspect any type of species (regular species, grid species, even the world...) or agent.

The optional facet type is used to specify the type of your inspector. 2 values are possible:

• agent (default value) if you want to display the information as a regular agent inspector. Note that if you want to inspect a large number of agents, this can take a lot of time. In this case, prefer the other type table
• table if you want to display the information as an agent browser.

The optional facet attributes is used to filter the attributes you want to display in your inspector.

Beware: only one agent inspector (type: agent) can be used for an experiment. Besides, you can add as many agent browsers (type: table) as you want for your experiment.

Example of implementation:

model new

global {
    init {
	create my_species number:3;
    }
}

species my_species {
    int int_attr <- 6;
    string str_attr <- "my_value";
    string str_attr_not_important <- "blabla";
}

grid my_grid_species width: 10 height: 10 {
    int rnd_value <- rnd(5);
}

experiment my_experiment type:gui {
    output {
	inspect "my_species_inspector" value: my_species attributes: ["int_attr","str_attr"];
	inspect "my_species_browser" value: my_species type: table;
	inspect "my_grid_species_browser" value: 5 among my_grid_species type: table;
    }
}

Another statement, browse, is doing a similar thing, but prefer the table type (if you want to browse an agent species, the default type will be the table type).