What is Drone?
Drone is a tool for automatically running batch jobs of a simulation program.
It allows sweeps over arbitrary sets of parameters, as well as multiple runs
for each parameter set, with a separate random seed for each run. The runs
may be executed either on a single computer or over the Internet on a set of
remote hosts. Drone is written in Expect
(an extension to the Tcl scripting
language) and runs under Unix. It was originally designed for use with the
Swarm
agent-based simulation framework, but Drone can be used with any
simulation program that reads parameters from the command line or from an
input file.
The Drone README file and User's Guide are both online.
Drone was written by Theodore C. Belding
for the CAR Group (Michael Cohen,
Robert Axelrod,
and Rick Riolo).
This work was supported by the Santa Fe Institute
and grant ONR N00014-95-1-0975 from the Office of Naval Research, acting
in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Additional support was provided by the
University of Michigan,
Center for the
Study of Complex Systems.
Drone is copyright (C) 1996 by the Regents of the University of Michigan.
It is free software; you can redistribute and modify it under the
terms of the GNU General Public License. This software comes with
absolutely no warranty.
What's New
970104:
Drone 1.03 has been released.
The list of changes is online.
There is also a patch to convert Drone
1.02 to Drone 1.03.
Download Drone
Download the full Drone 1.03
distribution. (A gzipped version is
available.)
The documentation is included in the Drone distribution and is also available separately:
Download the Drone README file.
Download the Drone User's Guide in
PostScript format, for US Letter paper. (A gzipped version is available.)
Download the Drone User's Guide in
PostScript format, for A4 paper. (A gzipped version is available.)
Download the Drone User's Guide in
LaTeX2e format. (A gzipped version is
available.)
Download the Drone User's Guide in
HTML format. (A gzipped version is
available.)
Drone email lists
There is a Drone email list:
drone-support@umich.edu.
To subscribe or unsubscribe to the list, send email to
drone-support-request@umich.edu.
Links
The Drone User's Guide contains a set of related URLs.
