GAMA is a generic platform written in Java, dedicated to the design and simulation of agent-based models. Initially designed in 2007 by the MSI team (forerunner of the UMMISCO Southeast Asia Center) in Hanoi, it has since been developed by a consortium of laboratories led by UMMISCO. GAMA integrates a development environment and a high-level modeling language (GAML) that offer significant advances over existing modeling platforms: (1) advanced management of geographic data, enabling GIS data to be reified and manipulated using dedicated spatial operators; (2) a set of structures and commands facilitating the definition of multi-level models, enabling a phenomenon to be described and observed at different scales in the same model, e.g. at city and individual levels; (3) automated model exploration tools for defining experimental designs and running them on high-performance computing resources (clusters, grids); (4) a plug-in system for extending the GAML language to meet the specific needs of certain fields of application, or for using different formalisms.

Each version of the platform has been downloaded around a thousand times since it was made available as open-source in January 2009, and we estimate the total number of users at around 2,000.