With recent advances in computational power, the investigation of complex and evolving systems with numerical methods became more and more feasible. This research developed a wide range of modelling techniques for said systems, most notably cellular automata, agent-based models, and network models. Scientists typically develop, implement, and analyze their models to address their specific research questions with a lower focus on software usability, transparency, and portability. In our group, this lead to many new researchers re-writing models from scratch instead of using and improving existing models. To resolve the problem, we developed Utopia, a modelling framework that provides facilities for the mentioned modelling techniques and includes the developed models themselves to be shared and improved within our group.

In this talk, we focus on the Utopia framework itself. We describe in detail the modelling approaches for complex and evolving systems and how Utopia supports every stage of our computational science workflow. While this talk extends on the colloquium of 9 January 2020, it is independent and does not require attendance of the first talk.