Laboratory for Simulation Development

This document contains a description of the main purposes and characteristics of Lsd. It discusses the problems related to the use of simulations in social sciences and describes how Lsd tackles these problems. In general, the use of simulations is constrained by two kinds of problems: difficulties in building the programs and difficulties to make use of other people’s programs. Lsd proposes a system to facilitate both aspects of the use of simulation models. This document is mainly concerned with the use of simulations by unskilled computer users, and describes in detail how Lsd can be successfully used to explore and use a model without requiring any programming knowledge. Though it is not the main concern of the document, there are also few hints on the aspect of simulation program building.