ABSTRACT
Agent-based simulation offers a lot of advantages compared to traditional (also microscopic) approaches, such as elegant representation of heterogeneous populations situated in heterogeneous environments, explicit treatment of local effects, or the possibility of formulating flexible interaction between entities based on intelligent behavior. Agent-based simulation is becoming more and more popular not only because of these properties. Additionally, it provides an intuitive and direct form of modeling. Coarsely said, entities observable in the real world can be described by entities in the virtual world. There is no abstraction step that necessarily bridges aggregation levels as in macro-simulation.
