We proudly present...

... the first attempt to connect the simulation platform NetLogo with the statistical analysis software R. It adds some new primitives to NetLogo, which offers the interchange of data with R and the call of R functions from NetLogo. See the documentation for more details. There is also the possiblity to open an Interactive R Shell from NetLogo.

For a quick start just download the zip package of the R-Extension for your NetLogo version (there are old version for NetLogo Version 4.0 and 4.1.x and a new (beta) version for NetLogo 5.0) from the files page. Extract the content of the zip file direcly into your extensions folder of your NetLogo installation. You should see a new folder r now, which is direcly placed beside the other NetLogo extension folders. Then browse into the folder doc within this r folder and read the documentation for the next steps.

The extension is distributed under the open source GNU General Public License, which means that you are free to use and modify it for any (open source) purpose.

An R-Package to connect NetLogo from within R (named RNetLogo) is also ready to use. It is available on R-Forge and CRAN.

Furthermore, we created an Rserve-Extension, which can be found here. This extension doesn't use the rJava/JRI package but uses the Rserve package. Therefore, this extension enables you to communicate with an Rserve server from within NetLogo. This makes the configuration easier and is the right way in case you use the RNetLogo package, because it is not possible to load the normal R-Extension in a model running via RNetLogo. But there is no interactive shell.

Please have also a look on our overview webpage about all our simulation software tools.

Good luck and we hope you find our extension useful!
Let us know about your experiences!

Contact: jthiele **at** gwdg **dot** de

Our R-Extension of NetLogo is also described here:

Thiele JC, Grimm V (2010). NetLogo meets R: Linking agent-based models with a toolbox for their analysis. Environmental Modelling and Software 25(8): 972 - 974. [DOI: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2010.02.008].

The online resources for this paper are here.

To get source code from svn:

svn co https://r-ext.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/r-ext r-ext

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Michael Henke, Enrico R. Crema, and Thomas Petzoldt for their support during development and testing of the extension.