Pickle: A flexible ABMS framework for dynamically generating serializable intelligent agents

Agent-based Modeling and Simulation has become a mainstream tool for use in business and research in multiple disciplines. Along with its mainstream status, ABMS has attracted the attention of practitioners who are not always comfortable developing software in Java, C++ or any of the scripting languages commonly used for ABMS frameworks. In particular, animal behavior researchers, or ethologists, require agent controllers that can describe complex animal behavior in dynamic, unpredictable environments. But the existing solutions for simplifying the description of agent controllers are inadequate for that challenge, so we present Pickle, an ABMS platform that generates complete simulations and agents using behavior-based controllers from simple XML file descriptions.