Agent-based models (ABMs) are one of the most effective and successful methods for analyzing real-world complex systems by investigating how modeling interactions on the individual level (i.e., micro-level) leads to the understanding of emergent phenomena on the system level (i.e., macro-level). ABMs represent an interdisciplinary approach to examining complex systems, and the heterogeneous background of ABM users demands comprehensive, easy-to-use, and efficient environments to develop ABM simulations. Currently, many tools, frameworks, and libraries exist, each with its characteristics and objectives. This article aims to guide newcomers in the jungle of ABM tools toward choosing the right tool for their skills and needs. This work proposes a thorough overview of open-source general-purpose ABM tools and offers a comparison from a two-fold perspective. We first describe an off-the-shelf evaluation by considering each ABM tool’s features, ease of use, and efficiency according to its authors. Then, we provide a hands-on evaluation of some ABM tools by judging the effort required in developing and running four ABM models and the obtained performance.

Today, coding skills are among the most required competencies worldwide, often also for non-computer scientists. Because of this trend, community contribution-based, question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms became prominent for finding the proper solution to all programming issues. Stack Overflow has been the most popular platform for technical-related questions for years. Still, recently, some programming-related subreddits of Reddit have become a standing stone for questions and discussions. This work investigates the developers’ behavior and community formation around the twenty most popular programming languages. We examined two consecutive years of programming-related questions from Stack Overflow and Reddit, performing a longitudinal study on users’ posting activity and their high-order interaction patterns abstracted via hypergraphs. Our analysis highlighted crucial differences in how these Q&A platforms are utilized by their users. In line with previous literature, it emphasized the constant decline of Stack Overflow in favor of more community-friendly platforms, such as Reddit, which has been growing rapidly lately.

Agent-based models is a fundamental approach to untangle and study complex systems. Over the last decade, the need for more elaborate computing-demanding models has given rise to many frameworks and tools to run ABM simulations. Current state-of-the-art ABM tools focus either on ease of use, performance, or a trade-off between these two elements. Still, efficiency-oriented solutions (required for both large and smallscale simulations) are vulnerable to memory flaws which could invalidate experiment results. This work aims to merge efficiency, reliability, and safety under an innovative ABM software framework based on the Rust programming language. Our framework, krABMaga, is an open-source library that offers a high-level environment by exploiting meta-programming and expandable visualization features. We equipped our library with a dynamic simulation monitoring system and model exploration and optimization capabilities over parallel, distributed and cloud architectures. After presenting the overall architecture and functionalities of krABMaga, we compare our framework's performance against the most widely adopted ABM software and the scalability potential of our simulation engine on a model calibration experiment running over an AWS EC2 virtual cluster machine. All code and examples models are available on GitHub.

Understanding the structural and linguistic properties of conversational data in social media is crucial for extracting meaningful insights to understand opinion dynamics, (mis-)information spreading, and the evolution of harmful behavior. Current state-of-the-art mathematical frameworks, such as hypergraphs and linguistic tools, such as large language models (LLMs), offer robust methodologies for modeling high-order group interactions and unprecedented capabilities for dealing with natural language-related tasks. In this study, we propose an innovative approach that blends these worlds by abstracting conversational networks via hypergraphs and analyzing their dynamics through LLMs. Our aim is to enhance the stance detection task by incorporating the high-order interactions naturally embedded within a conversation, thereby enriching the contextual understanding of LLMs regarding the intricate human dynamics underlying social media data.