The EURACE project: An agent-based software platform
for European economic policy design with heterogeneous
interacting agents: new insights from a bottom up
approach to economic modelling and simulation.
Summary:
Macroeconomic policy design plays a fundamental role in social welfare and requires a coordinated
application of economic policy measures, e.g., fisscal and monetary strategies, knowledge exchange,
R&D incentives etc. Generally speaking, the interplay of such different measures is not completely
understood and macroeconomic design follows a classical approach. Conversely, there is considerable
interest in the development of an alternative paradigm to the rational representative agent model.
The EURACE project (a EU funded FET Proactive Initiative, to start September, 2006) proposes to tackle
this complex problem using an innovative approach to macroeconomic modelling and economic
policy design within the agent-based computational economics framework. The project objectives
are characterized by scientific, technological and societal scopes.
From the scientific point of view,
the main effort regards the study and the development of multi-agent models that reproduce, at
the aggregate economic level, the emergence of global features as a self-organized process from the
complex pattern of interactions among heterogeneous individuals.
From the technological point of
view, the project will develop, with advanced software engineering techniques, a software platform
in order to realize a powerful environment for large-scale agent-based economic simulations. Key
issues will be the definition of formal languages for modelling and for optimizing code generation,
the development of scalable computational simulation tools and the standardization of data with
easy to use human-machine interfaces.
Finally, from the social point of view, the agent-based
software platform for the simulation of the European economy will have an outstanding impact on
the economic policy design capabilities of the European Union.
It will be a powerful tool, enabling to
perform what-if analysis, optimizing the impact of regulatory decisions that will be quantitatively
based on European economy scenarios.
Links:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~stc/eurace/