System

There is often a significant fragmentation in the data formats, models and tools used by academic and industrial communities when studying and optimizing techno-socio-economic systems such as transportation systems, financial markets or infrastructural networks, i.e. power, gas and water networks. This means that several communities use or develop their own data formats, models and tools that do not allow a more universal evaluation and comparison of models and mechanisms. This phenomenon results in discrepancies of findings or very customized solutions with limited applicability.
Motivated by this limiting status-quo, SFINA, the Simulation Framework for Intelligent Network Adaptations is designed.

SFINA represents complex techno-socio-economic systems as temporal flow networks modeled by dynamic directed weighted graphs.

In contrast to static undirected unweighted graphs that only show a snapshot of interactions, a temporal flow network encompasses both structural and functional aspects of most techno-socio-economic systems.

The core operation of SFINA is the flow analysis that computes the flow in a network given its physical characteristics in an application domain.

The grant objective of SFINA is to provide development toolkits to build and evaluate generic and modular flow regulation mechanisms applicable in different flow analysis models and, even application domains.

SFINA is by design a decentralized multi-agent system and it is an open-source implementation in Java.
SFINA is divided in three layers

Domain knowledge and dynamics concern real-world data and physical laws that govern techno-socio-economics systems.

Flow networks are an abstraction of domain knowledge and dynamics.

Regulation models, policies and mechanisms are generic and reusable implementations by the users of the SFINA software.

The three layers of SFINA enable an integrated analysis and prototyping of techno-socio- economic systems with two novel capabilities:

Support of flow analysis and regulatory models for systems of the same domain.

Support of flow analysis and regulatory models for systems of the several independent or inter-dependent domains.

These capabilities result in the following advantage:

An implemented flow regulation model can be evaluated with different integrated tools of the same domain but also among different domains.

An implemented flow regulation model can be evaluated with different integrated tools of the same domain but also among different domains.

For example, a flow regulation mechanism for mitigating cascading failures can be evaluated with multiple integrated tools of a certain domain, e.g. power networks.

One tool may support the power flow analysis and another tool the transient stability.

Moreover, the same flow regulation mechanism can be evaluated in another domain as well, e.g. gas and water networks.

SFINA is by design a decentralized multi-agent system and it is an open-source implementation in Java.

A SFINA user writes once an application and evaluates it by integrating different tools of the same or different application domain without changing a single line of code in its application.