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Comment by goombastic | Hacker News Reader

What are there tools that help simulate complex systems? Things like biochemical balances in the human body, economies, enzyme actions and homeostasis, environment and climate? Etc etc...? What tools are used by those in the profession?

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Agent-Based Modeling is an approach to understanding complex systems by simulating interactions between actors in a population. The actors can be modeled with varying properties, and the output of the model often produces emergent behavior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model

Check out the NetLogo ABM environment for several pre-built example models.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

The following research that uses Harel Statecharts for cell-level modelling may be of interest:

Bloch N, Weiss G, Szekely S, Harel D (2015) An Interactive Tool for Animating Biology, and Its Use in Spatial and Temporal Modeling of a Cancerous Tumor and Its Microenvironment. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0133484. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133484

I guess simulations are commonly just large number crunching machines based on the matrix-algebra, but for example fluid-simulations can gain quite a lot of power from algorithms that divide the space into sub-cells and focusing on areas with more detail.

That sounds like an incredibly broad domain of tools.

The tools are probably probably domain specific as well. But are there any standard/OTS commercial tools for this?

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