AnyLogic North America was pleased to send one of its own modelers, Scott Hebert, to Dr. Nate Osgood’s 3rd Annual Agent-Based Modeling Bootcamp for Health Researchers last week at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK, Canada. Dr. Osgood’s platform of choice is AnyLogic for many reasons, not least the graphical nature of the editor, the excellent support offered by The AnyLogic Company, and the software’s multimethod capabilities.

The bootcamp was attended by roughly 25 people, most of them academicians, with a high proportion of them interested in epidemiology. However, according to Dr. Osgood, a large proportion of attendees indicated that multimethod modeling was an item of high interest to them, and he adjusted the course content accordingly. Scott participated in the workshop as a modeling expert and assisted the other attendees in their coursework.

The bootcamp’s schedule had mostly lectures and ‘build along’ tutorials in the mornings; presentations of Dr. Osgood’s projects using AnyLogic during lunches, which served as more advanced examples of AnyLogic’s capabilities; and focused attendee-specified projects in the afternoons. This format was very effective in training both AnyLogic and the theory of Agent-Based Modeling.

Overall, the attendees seemed to appreciate the capabilities of AnyLogic to a high degree, and Scott received numerous expressions of interest in both the software and also The AnyLogic Company’s consulting expertise. He also carefully recorded all of the feedback on how to improve the software, of which there were many sensible suggestions.