Agents.addPrimitive(namestr, classclass, pluralstrNone, dfltint50, lowint1, highint100, stepint1, hiddenboolFalse, priorityint100, orderstrNone)

Registers an agent primitive. A primitive, like a breed, is a way of introducing heterogeneity into a model, but there are several differences.

1. Breeds do not affect the order of stepping. All agents of a primitive are stepped before any agents of another (this order can be changed with the priority argument).
2. Breed is set as a property of the agent, which can be used with conditional logic in agent hooks. Building a primitive requires building a new agent class, which allows cleaner separation of logic where different types of agents behave in completely different ways.
3. A use case of breeds would be different types of consumers. A use case of primitives would be consumers versus stores.

Parameters

• name — str, required

  The name of the primitive.

• class — class, required

  A class, defined in user code, that re-instantiates the functions of Agent. It is a good idea to have this class inherit from BaseAgent.

• plural — str, optional

  The plural form of name. If plural is not specified, the plural will be constructed by placing an 's' at the end of the name.

  Default value: None

• dflt — int, optional

  Registering a primitive adds a slider to the control panel indicating how many of the primitive to instantiate at the beginning of the model. dflt is the default value on this slider.

  Default value: 50

• low — int, optional

  The slider's lower limit

  Default value: 1

• high — int, optional

  The slider's upper limit

  Default value: 100

• step — int, optional

  The increment in which the slider moves. For example, set to 2 to enforce only an even number of agents of this primitive.

  Default value: 1

• hidden — bool, optional

  Whether to hide the slider for altering the number of agents of this primitive from the control panel. If hidden = True, the initial number instantiated will be dflt.

  Default value: False

• priority — int, optional

  The order in which to step the primitives. Primitives with lower numbers are stepped first.

  Default value: 100

• order — str, optional

  Allows the order of activation to be specified on a per-primitive basis, overriding model.order. Possible values are:

  • 'random', which shuffles the list of agents before each stage
  • 'linear', which preserves the order of activation between periods.
  • 'match-n', which steps agents in groups of n and passes them to the match hook. If order=='match' (without the -n), agents will pair off at random (i.e. n==2).
  More complex orderings can be specified using the [primitive]Order hook. If not specified, defaults to the value of model.order.

  Default value: None