Agent-Based Modeling

While we have been at the Santa Fe Complex we have seen various examples of the practical uses of agent-based modeling. Basically, you can think of agent-based modeling as basically representing something in the real world, for example, and agent can represent an ant or person. The different agents that are created will then interact with each other in a manner that represents what they would be doing in real life. By using the ant example again, the ants can search for food, and then carry the food back to their hole, and then begin that the task over. For more information about agent-based modeling, you can go check out the wikipedia article about it.


The program "NetLogo" allows someone to create an agent-based model by using a graphical user interface to handle some of the complexities of making models.


We have been thinking of various ways that it might be possible to use NetLogo to model the electrical infrastructure of Santa Fe.


One of these idea's is to make it so that the existing electric grid is shown in the model, and then the user can place different types of renewable power plants or give different homes or business's solar panels on their roofs, and to then show how the grid is affected by those changes. By adding Solar power to one part of the grid, it could inadvertently cause the grid in that area to fail because the power might be to great for the power lines to handle.


In a very simple form (as seen in the screen shot below), I have made it so that it displays the current distribution of where Santa Fe gets its electricity through PNM (Coal/Nuclear plants).

The user can then add more power plants to the system to see how that effects the total ammount of power produced, and what the various percentages of energy sources are.

This is very basic right now, but in the near future I will try to include the impacts on consumer cost, CO2 emissions, and perhaps some other factors that might be interesting to know. I also have not figured out how to go about having the entire grid laid out based off of GIS-layers because I can display them, but not really interact with them very well yet.