Common and domain-specific metamodel elements for problem description in simulation problems

It is well known that the multi-agent system paradigm is well suited for modelling and developing simulations of complex systems belonging to several application domains. Simulation study aims at developing simulation models useful for representing, studying and analyzing entities and their behavior in a system according to specific purposes. With our work we are trying to understand what are the right elements to be considered and included in the description of a simulation problem. In order to root our resulting metamodel in the state of the art of multi-agent simulations we started from the study of twelve papers dealing with four different application domains: Crowd Dynamics, Traffic and Transportation, Electricity Power Engineering and Supply Chain and Logistic. From this study we obtained a metamodel that may be used by an analyst as a guideline and concept repository for facing a new system design. The metamodel is the result of a well defined approach that is described together with the obtained results consisting in one core metamodel containing elements that are common to all the four application domains and some domain extension contents. These latter contain the elements that are specific of each of the studied domains and are not present in the others.