Getting started

To get started, you can follow two steps:

1. Install the package, there are two options: with Conda (recommended), and with pip and venv.

2. Execute the program, this will launch the Command Line Interface from which you will be able to run simulations. For more information about how to use the Command Line Interface see

For a more advance use, you can add your own models, to do that follow these instructions

Computational Environment:

• Programming language: Python

• Packages and libraries: see the requirements.txt file or the environment.yml file

Installation instructions with Conda (recommended)

Before installing this code, make sure to have conda installed, you can use the command conda --version on the terminal. If you don’t have conda, you can download Miniconda it from here (Miniconda will contain conda), and follow these installation instructions

1. Fork and clone this repository.

2. In a shell, move to the directory containing the repository.

3. Run the following command:

conda env create --file environment.yml

4. Run the command conda env list you should see “f_abm_env” as one of the listed environments.

If you wish to delete the environment you can type

conda remove --name f_abm_env --all

You can verify that the environment was deleted by typing

conda info --f_abm_env

To activate the conda virtual environment type conda activate f_abm_env, to deactivate it type conda deactivate.

Installation instructions with pip and venv

Note 1: for this to work you need to make sure you have pip and venv installed in your computer. You can find here more information about pip and virtual environments.

Note 2: these instructions assume you have Python 3 installed in your computer.

If you are unsure your computer has these requirements, please follow the recommended installation instructions.

1. Fork and clone this repository

2. Create a virtual environtment and install the rependencies usign the following commands (if you face any problems, see the official documentation):

python3 -m venv ./f_abm_env  % Use 'venv' to create a virual environment called 'f_abm_env'
source ./f_abm_env/bin/activate  % Activate the virtual environment
pip install -r requirements.txt  % Install the dependencies from the requirements.txt

3. A file called ‘f_abm_env’ should appear now in the current directory.

If you wish to delete the environment you can type

rm -r f_abm_env

To activate the venv virtual environment type source ./f_abm_env/bin/activate, to deactivate it type deactivate.

Program execution

1. Make sure you are in the main project directory, which is called f_abm

2. In order to use the program, it is first necessary to activate the virtual environment, if the installation was done using Conda type:

conda activate f_abm_env

to deactivate the Conda environment you can type conda deactivate

If the installation was done using venv type:

source ./f_abm_env/bin/activate

to deactivate the virtual environment you can type deactiate

3. To start the program type

python start.py

and follow the instructions, all the options have default parameters, so feel free to press enter to all the questions.

4. If there were no mistakes, you can go to the directory ./f_abm/simulation_results, there you should find a directory with the name Simulation-YYYYMMDDHHMMSS that contains three images, resulting from the simulation.

Tests

The code includes a script to run tests and check that the code is working as intended. To run the test, execute the script code_test.py by typing in the terminal (while in the project directory)

python3 src/code_test.py

After executing this code, a histogram should appear, and also file called ‘example_opinions.npy’.