Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference A. Tolk, S. D. Diallo, I. O. Ryzhov, L. Yilmaz, S. Buckley, and J. A. Miller, eds. APPROACHING SIMULATION TO MODELERS: A USER INTERFACE FOR LARGE-SCALE DEMOGRAPHIC SIMULATION Cristina Montañola-Sales, Josep Casanovas-Garcia Bhakti S. S. Onggo UniversitatPolitècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech Management Science Department Barcelona Supercomputing Center Lancaster University JordiGirona 29, 08034 Barcelona, Spain Lancaster LA1 4YX, United Kingdom Jose Maria Cela-Espín Adriana Kaplan-Marcusán Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech Dept. d’Antropologia Cultural i Social Barcelona Supercomputing Center Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona JordiGirona 29, 08034 Barcelona, Spain 08193 Bellaterra, Spain ABSTRACT Agent-based modeling is one of the promising modeling tools that can be used in the study of population dynamics. Two of the main obstacles hindering the use of agent-based simulation in practice are its scalability when the analysis requires large-scale models as in policy research, and its ease-of-use especially for users with no programming experience. While there has been a significant work on the scalability issue, ease-of-use aspect has not been addressed in the same intensity. This poster presents a graphical user interface designed for a simulation tool which allows modelers with no programming background to specify agent-based demographic models and run them on parallel environments. The interface eases the definition of models to describe individual and group dynamics processes with both qualitative and quantitative data. The main advantage is to allow users to transparently run the models on high performance computing infrastructures. 1 INTRODUCTION Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a useful approach to deep on the understanding of population dynamics through simulation. The main reason is that the object of study in these disciplines, human society present or past, is difficult to analyze through classical analytical techniques due to the unpredictable and changing (dynamic) nature. ABM has already been applied to demographic simulation at a small scenario scale (Billari, Ongaro, and Prskawetz, 2003). However, complex policy models that include biological factors (such as health-related factors), cognitive factors (such as learning) or social factors (such as social network) may require a significant amount of computing power. Parallel simulation techniques might pay an important role in the future of social simulation, supporting the management of large simulations. To approach agent-based techniques to modelers interested in population projections, we developed a tool (called Yades) which simulates the demographic evolution and interactions of individuals in a society (Onggo 2008). It provides the placeholders for different demographic processes such as fertility, mortality, change in economic status, change in marital status, and migration with two different type of agents: family unit and regions. Yades has three components: a web user interface, a demographic 4035 978-1-4799-7486-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE