Predicate Collection Classes.

Abstract

Collections are at the heart of every program. Modern programming languages have acknowledged this fact by including increasingly better expression mechanisms for manipulating collections of data and objects. When existing objects are selected as elements of collections, often there is an implicit intention that those objects, by means of having been selected, take on new roles. Such is the case, for example, with shared data in distributed simulations, which changes over time, and which distributed components may use for different purposes as the simulation unfolds.This paper presents the concept of Predicate Collection Classes (PCCs). PCCs are both classes and specifications of how to select and reclassify objects from existing collections. We describe the informal semantics of PCCs and demonstrate how they can be used to express several iterative algorithms that make heavy use of collections. Finally, we summarize our use of PCCs in a framework for distributed simulations.

Toward Understanding the Impact of User Participation in Autonomous Ridesharing Systems

“…STARS is a multi-agent simulation platform on top of a simulation framework called Spacetime (Valadares et al 2016;Lopes et al 2017). Spacetime follows a proof-of-concept paradigm called Predicate Collection Classes (PCCs) (Lopes et al 2017) to increase modularity.…”

“…STARS is a multi-agent simulation platform on top of a simulation framework called Spacetime (Valadares et al 2016;Lopes et al 2017). Spacetime follows a proof-of-concept paradigm called Predicate Collection Classes (PCCs) (Lopes et al 2017) to increase modularity. The design of STARS consists of five aspects: frame, time flow, data flow control, data model, and data store (See Figure 1a for an abstract view of STARS).…”

“…Data model defines the objects of the simulation in terms of classes that are both types and sets. These classes are called Predicate Collection Classes (PCCs) (Lopes et al 2017).…”

“…It assumes a distributed simulation environment using pass-by-copy to fulfill data requests, and handles the operation of pushing state updates back. In the original design of Spacetime, each application is encapsulated and is independent of each other (Valadares et al 2016;Lopes et al 2017). However, multi-agent simulations typically require interactions between different applications (agents) (Macal and North 2010).…”