Dependency Provenance in Agent Based Modeling

Abstract

Researchers who use agent-based models (ABM) to model social patterns often focus on the model's aggregate phenomena. However, aggregation of individuals complicates the understanding of agent interactions and the uniqueness of individuals. We develop a method for tracing and capturing the provenance of individuals and their interactions in the NetLogo ABM, and from this create a "dependency provenance slice", which combines a data slice and a program slice to yield insights into the cause-effect relations among system behaviors. To cope with the large volume of fine-grained provenance traces, we propose use-inspired filters to reduce the amount of provenance, and a provenance slicing technique called "non-preprocessing provenance slicing" that directly queries over provenance traces without recovering all provenance entities and dependencies beforehand. We evaluate performance and utility using a well known ecological NetLogo model called "wolf-sheep-predation".