Engineering Collective Adaptive Systems with CASSim

Interest in autonomous systems has only grown over the past decade. Several platforms and tools have been introduced over that time to assist with advancing this field of research. These technologies are necessary to support the engineering and evaluation of autonomous systems, such as drones and vehicles. These systems are also deployed as collective adaptive systems (CASs), which can be especially difficult to evaluate since their behavior can have a different impact on individual and collective performance. Evaluating these systems requires extensive experimentation and simulation. However, there remains a lack of open-source applications that can simulate the wide variety of CASs that are being developed. In this paper, we introduce the collective adaptive system simulation (CASSim) to assist researchers in engineering and evaluating CASs. We describe the implementation of the simulator and provide an example of a simulation with results that can be compared to prior work.