Ethan Codron

Complex network simulation has long been a great challenge in the scientific community, in part due to developers of simulation packages striving to achieve a delicate balance between solving capabilities, accuracy, and ease-of-use. Furthermore, such packages are often heavily dependent on other packages in the language they were developed for, which introduces its own set of problems such as potential version mismatches, API updates, and discontinued support. Oftentimes, the documentation of these packages fails to address exactly what each function in the API expects, what the meanings of different parameter values are, and what functionality is deprecated in newer versions. From a programmatic point of view, these packages can be powerful, but lack several key features necessary to facilitate simulation of dynamically sized complex networks, such as algal clusters. In this paper, we present our simulation package, Network Dynamics eXperimentation Library (NDXL), which aims to tackle the challenges of complex network simulation, while not having any dependencies except for the C standard library, eliminating all the potential dependency issues. We show how its flexibility can be leveraged to simulate a variety of networks, most notably a dynamically sized algal network on a per-cell basis, which opens the door to a level of simulation precision previously virtually impossible to achieve.