Eurace
Macroeconomic policy design plays a fundamental role in social welfare and requires a coordinated application of economic policy measures, e.g., fiscal and monetary strategies, knowledge exchange, R&D incentives etc. Generally speaking, the interplay of such different measures is not completely understood and macroeconomic design follows a classical approach. Conversely, there is considerable interest in the development of an alternative paradigm to the rational representative agent model.
The EURACE project - An agent-based software platform for European economic policy design with heterogeneous interacting agents: new insights from a bottom up approach to economic modeling and simulation - proposed to tackle this complex problem using an innovative approach to macroeconomic modelling and economic policy design within the agent-based computational economics framework. The project objectives were characterized by scientific, technological and societal scopes.
From the scientific point of view, the main effort regarded the study and the development of multi-agent models that reproduce, at the aggregate economic level, the emergence of global features as a self organized process from the complex pattern of interactions among heterogeneous individuals.
From the technological point of view, the project developed, with advanced software engineering techniques, a software platform in order to realize a powerful environment for large-scale agent-based economic simulations. Key issues were the definition of formal languages for modelling and for optimizing code generation, the development of scalable computational simulation tools and the standardization of data with easy to use human-machine interfaces.
Finally, from the social point of view, the agent-based software platform for the simulation of the European economy seeked to have an impact on the economic policy design capabilities of the European Union.
EURACE was funded by
the European Commission under FP6. The main page of the
project can be found at www.eurace.org. The project ended in September 2009.