Regional Multi Agent Simulator is the name of both a research project and of the model behind it.

As a project, RegMAS is a 18 months internally-founded grant of the Department of Economics, Polytechnic University of Marche. The grant started on 1.February.2007 and will end on 31.July.2008. Updated: project has been refinanced.

As a model, RegMAS is a spatially explicit, multi-agent representation of rural systems with an emphasis on the agriculture.

Spatially explicit multi-agent models of agricultural systems started to appear at the end of the '90es, with the works of Balmann (1997) and Berger (2001). As a form of computational simulation, multi-agent models could not rise without the growing computational power of broadly available computers. A second critical factor was the emerging object-oriented paradigm that greatly simplified the transposition of model concepts to computer programs.

The model initially developed by Balmann, AgriPoliS, is the only one that is still actively maintained and used by a relatively large group of researchers.

The problem seems to be in the modeling tools rather than been methodological.

While AgriPoliS is implemented using a pure programming language, subsequent models (e.g. Castella 2005, An 2005) was written using a so called multi-agent toolkit, like Swarm or Cormas.

This toolkits further simplify the transposition of model concepts in computer code, but at the costs of restriction on modeling freedom and of much higher computational costs.

While been very detailed in modeling the farm structure and the farmer decision processes, AgriPoliS still lack to effectively link the agricultural systems with the rest of the components in the rural areas. There are no connection e.g. with the other land usage.