Mesa 3

Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025 - Published in JOSS (2025)

Science Score: 100.0%

This score indicates how likely this project is to be science-related based on various indicators:

✓
CITATION.cff file
Found CITATION.cff file
✓
codemeta.json file
Found codemeta.json file
✓
.zenodo.json file
Found .zenodo.json file
✓
DOI references
Found 6 DOI reference(s) in README and JOSS metadata
✓
Academic publication links
Links to: joss.theoj.org
✓
Committers with academic emails
15 of 167 committers (9.0%) from academic institutions
○
Institutional organization owner
✓
JOSS paper metadata
Published in Journal of Open Source Software

Keywords

agent-based-modeling agent-based-simulation complex-systems complexity-analysis gis mesa modeling-agents simulation simulation-environment simulation-framework spatial-models

Keywords from Contributors

mesh hydrology parallel fem cryptocurrencies finite-elements exoplanet energy-system dependency-distance voice-conversion

Scientific Fields

Sociology Social Sciences - 64% confidence

Last synced: 4 months ago · JSON representation ·

Repository

Mesa is an open-source Python library for agent-based modeling, ideal for simulating complex systems and exploring emergent behaviors.

Basic Info

Host: GitHub
Owner: projectmesa
License: apache-2.0
Language: Python
Default Branch: main
Homepage: https://mesa.readthedocs.io
Size: 14 MB

Statistics

Stars: 3,118
Watchers: 97
Forks: 1,032
Open Issues: 156
Releases: 41

Topics

agent-based-modeling agent-based-simulation complex-systems complexity-analysis gis mesa modeling-agents simulation simulation-environment simulation-framework spatial-models

Created over 11 years ago · Last pushed 4 months ago

Metadata Files

Readme Changelog Contributing License Code of conduct Citation

Mesa: Agent-based modeling in Python

| | | |---------| --- | | CI/CD | | | Package | | | Meta | | | Chat | | | Cite | |

Mesa allows users to quickly create agent-based models using built-in core components (such as spatial grids and agent schedulers) or customized implementations; visualize them using a browser-based interface; and analyze their results using Python's data analysis tools. Its goal is to be the Python-based alternative to NetLogo, Repast, or MASON.

A screenshot of the WolfSheep Model in Mesa

Above: A Mesa implementation of the WolfSheep model, this can be displayed in browser windows or Jupyter.

Features

Modular components
Browser-based visualization
Built-in tools for analysis
Example model library

Using Mesa

To install our latest stable release, run:

bash pip install -U mesa

Starting with Mesa 3.0, we don't install all our dependencies anymore by default. ```bash

You can customize the additional dependencies you need, if you want. Available are:

pip install -U "mesa[network,viz]"

This is equivalent to our recommended dependencies:

pip install -U "mesa[rec]"

To install all, including developer, dependencies:

pip install -U "mesa[all]" ```

You can also use pip to install the latest GitHub version:

bash pip install -U -e git+https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa@main#egg=mesa

Or any other (development) branch on this repo or your own fork:

bash pip install -U -e git+https://github.com/YOUR_FORK/mesa@YOUR_BRANCH#egg=mesa

Resources

For resources or help on using Mesa, check out the following:

Intro to Mesa Tutorial (An introductory model, the Boltzmann Wealth Model, for beginners or those new to Mesa.)
Visualization Tutorial (An introduction into our Solara visualization)
Complexity Explorer Tutorial (An advanced-beginner model, SugarScape with Traders, with instructional videos)
Mesa Examples (A repository of seminal ABMs using Mesa and examples of employing specific Mesa Features)
Docs (Mesa's documentation, API and useful snippets)
- Development version docs (the latest version docs if you're using a pre-release Mesa version)
Discussions (GitHub threaded discussions about Mesa)
Matrix Chat (Chat Forum via Matrix to talk about Mesa)

Running Mesa in Docker

You can run Mesa in a Docker container in a few ways.

If you are a Mesa developer, first install Docker Compose and then, in the folder containing the Mesa Git repository, you run:

``` bash $ docker compose up

If you want to make it run in the background, you instead run

$ docker compose up -d ```

This runs the Schelling model, as an example.

With the docker-compose.yml file in this Git repository, the docker compose up command does two important things:

It mounts the mesa root directory (relative to the docker-compose.yml file) into /opt/mesa and runs pip install -e on that directory so your changes to mesa should be reflected in the running container.
It binds the docker container's port 8765 to your host system's port 8765 so you can interact with the running model as usual by visiting localhost:8765 on your browser

If you are a model developer that wants to run Mesa on a model, you need to:

make sure that your model folder is inside the folder containing the docker-compose.yml file
change the MODEL_DIR variable in docker-compose.yml to point to the path of your model
make sure that the model folder contains an app.py file

Then, you just need to run docker compose up -d to have it accessible from localhost:8765.

Contributing to Mesa

Want to join the Mesa team or just curious about what is happening with Mesa? You can...

Join our Matrix chat room in which questions, issues, and ideas can be (informally) discussed.

Come to a monthly dev session (you can find dev session times, agendas and notes on Mesa discussions).

Just check out the code on GitHub.

If you run into an issue, please file a ticket for us to discuss. If possible, follow up with a pull request.

If you would like to add a feature, please reach out via ticket or join a dev session (see Mesa discussions). A feature is most likely to be added if you build it!

Don't forget to checkout the Contributors guide.

Citing Mesa

To cite Mesa in your publication, you can refer to our peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): - ter Hoeven, E., Kwakkel, J., Hess, V., Pike, T., Wang, B., rht, & Kazil, J. (2025). Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(107), 7668. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07668

Our CITATION.cff can be used to generate APA, BibTeX and other citation formats.

Owner

Name: Project Mesa
Login: projectmesa
Kind: organization

Repositories: 9
Profile: https://github.com/projectmesa

Mesa is an open-source Python library for agent-based modeling, ideal for simulating complex systems and exploring emergent behaviors.

JOSS Publication

Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025

Published

March 28, 2025

DOI

10.21105/joss.07668

Volume 10, Issue 107, Page 7668

Authors

Ewout ter Hoeven

Delft University of Technology (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management), the Netherlands

Jan Kwakkel

Delft University of Technology (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management), the Netherlands

Vincent Hess

Independent Researcher, Germany

Thomas Pike

George Mason University (Department of Computational Social Science), United States

Boyu Wang

University at Buffalo (Department of Geography), United States

Rht

Independent Researcher

Jackie Kazil

George Mason University (Department of Computational Social Science), United States

Editor

George K. Thiruvathukal

Citation (CITATION.cff)

cff-version: "1.2.0"
authors:
- family-names: Hoeven
  given-names: Ewout
  name-particle: ter
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0805-3425"
- family-names: Kwakkel
  given-names: Jan
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9447-2954"
- family-names: Hess
  given-names: Vincent
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9242-8500"
- family-names: Pike
  given-names: Thomas
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1576-0283"
- family-names: Wang
  given-names: Boyu
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9879-2138"
- family-names: rht
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6902-111X"
- family-names: Kazil
  given-names: Jackie
  orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8300-7384"
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.15090710
message: If you use this software, please cite our article in the
  Journal of Open Source Software.
preferred-citation:
  authors:
  - family-names: Hoeven
    given-names: Ewout
    name-particle: ter
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0805-3425"
  - family-names: Kwakkel
    given-names: Jan
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9447-2954"
  - family-names: Hess
    given-names: Vincent
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9242-8500"
  - family-names: Pike
    given-names: Thomas
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1576-0283"
  - family-names: Wang
    given-names: Boyu
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9879-2138"
  - family-names: rht
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6902-111X"
  - family-names: Kazil
    given-names: Jackie
    orcid: "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8300-7384"
  date-published: 2025-03-28
  doi: 10.21105/joss.07668
  issn: 2475-9066
  issue: 107
  journal: Journal of Open Source Software
  publisher:
    name: Open Journals
  start: 7668
  title: "Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025"
  type: article
  url: "https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.07668"
  volume: 10
title: "Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025"

GitHub Events

Total

Create event: 51
Commit comment event: 1
Release event: 15
Delete event: 39
Member event: 7
Pull request event: 521
Fork event: 175
Issues event: 240
Watch event: 641
Issue comment event: 2,025
Push event: 335
Gollum event: 46
Pull request review comment event: 608
Pull request review event: 875

Last Year

Create event: 51
Commit comment event: 1
Release event: 15
Delete event: 39
Member event: 7
Pull request event: 521
Fork event: 175
Issues event: 240
Watch event: 641
Issue comment event: 2,025
Push event: 335
Gollum event: 46
Pull request review comment event: 608
Pull request review event: 875

Committers

Last synced: 5 months ago

All Time

Total Commits: 2,319
Total Committers: 167
Avg Commits per committer: 13.886
Development Distribution Score (DDS): 0.819

Past Year

Commits: 422
Committers: 32
Avg Commits per committer: 13.188
Development Distribution Score (DDS): 0.602

Top Committers

Name	Email	Commits
rht	r**t@p**m	420
jackiekazil	j**l@g**m	367
Ewout ter Hoeven	E**n@s**l	298
David Masad	d**d@g**m	168
Jan Kwakkel	j**l@t**l	134
Corvince	1****e	127
tpike3	b**8@g**m	97
Tortar	6****r	58
pre-commit-ci[bot]	6****]	49
Taylor Mutch	t**h@g**m	42
cauemello	c**o@g**m	24
Dustin J. Mitchell	d**n@v**s	23
Jeetu	a**p@y**m	22
Sahil Chhoker	c**5@g**m	19
ReblochonMasque	t**d@g**m	17
Animesh Rawat	1****9	15
Wang Boyu	b**y@g**m	13
Jon Schiefelbein	l**e@h**m	13
Drewrey Lupton	d**y@g**m	13
SebastianoF	s**s@g**m	12
Thomas Johnson	t**0@h**m	12
dependabot[bot]	4****]	11
Matt Davis	j**b@g**m	10
Nathan Miller	n**m@g**m	10
rlskoeser	r**r@p**u	9
Sascha Holzhauer	S**r@u**e	9
Sanika	n**p@g**m	9
Stephen Mubita	s**a@a**m	8
James Arruda	j**a@g**m	8
ihopethiswillfi	i**i@y**m	7
and 137 more...

Committer Domains (Top 20 + Academic)

kensho.com: 1 mjsquare.com: 1 ymail.com: 1 microsoft.com: 1 student.rug.nl: 1 4angle.com: 1 realgo.com: 1 nessiness.com: 1 uct.ac.za: 1 groton.org: 1 berkeley.edu: 1 redhat.com: 1 plaksha.edu.in: 1 esciencecenter.nl: 1 jetbrains.com: 1 qq.com: 1 complyadvantage.com: 1 bbva.com: 1 sec-bremen.de: 1 stsci.edu: 1 asu.edu: 1 uw.edu: 1 calvin.edu: 1 vt.edu: 1 calpoly.edu: 1 tum.de: 1 uni-kassel.de: 1 princeton.edu: 1 tudelft.nl: 1 student.tudelft.nl: 1

Issues and Pull Requests

Last synced: 4 months ago

All Time

Total issues: 337
Total pull requests: 1,301
Average time to close issues: over 1 year
Average time to close pull requests: 25 days
Total issue authors: 118
Total pull request authors: 97
Average comments per issue: 3.77
Average comments per pull request: 5.5
Merged pull requests: 969
Bot issues: 0
Bot pull requests: 50

Past Year

Issues: 126
Pull requests: 663
Average time to close issues: 8 days
Average time to close pull requests: 6 days
Issue authors: 46
Pull request authors: 47
Average comments per issue: 2.05
Average comments per pull request: 4.69
Merged pull requests: 492
Bot issues: 0
Bot pull requests: 21

View more stats

Top Authors

Issue Authors

EwoutH (65)
quaquel (38)
rht (30)
jackiekazil (26)
tpike3 (12)
Corvince (11)
rlskoeser (10)
Sahil-Chhoker (7)
wang-boyu (5)
AlABarazi (4)
dmasad (4)
SebastianoF (3)
mikevlan (2)
henrykironde (2)
DrEntropy (2)

Pull Request Authors

EwoutH (332)
rht (210)
quaquel (206)
Corvince (75)
jackiekazil (63)
tpike3 (45)
Sahil-Chhoker (44)
pre-commit-ci[bot] (40)
sanika-n (25)
wang-boyu (19)
aarav-shukla07 (14)
colinfrisch (12)
dependabot[bot] (9)
Holzhauer (8)
catherinedevlin (8)

Top Labels

Issue Labels

docs (23) visualisation (18) bug (16) feature (16) Sprints! (14) good first issue (12) 0 - Triage (11) enhancement (8) discuss (8) 1 - Backlog (8) help wanted (8) example (7) Performance (6) easy task!!! (4) front end (4) ci (4) maintenance (4) ignore-for-release (3) experimental (3) breaking (3) 2 - WIP (3) wontfix (1) Feature (1) javascript (1) p1 (1) testing (1) has_pr (1)

Pull Request Labels

docs (165) ignore-for-release (127) enhancement (105) maintenance (86) feature (86) bug (82) visualisation (70) example (63) ci (51) experimental (48) breaking (31) testing (24) backport (19) deprecation (19) easy task!!! (15) trigger-benchmarks (15) backport-candidate (13) dependencies (11) github_actions (9) 3 - Accept (9) Performance (8) 2 - WIP (8) Sprints! (8) discuss (3) help wanted (3) packaging (2) BREAKING Change (2) depedency (1)

Packages

Total packages: 4
Total downloads:
- pypi 38,447 last-month

Total dependent packages: 9
(may contain duplicates)
Total dependent repositories: 140
(may contain duplicates)
Total versions: 142
Total maintainers: 6

pypi.org: mesa

Agent-based modeling (ABM) in Python

Documentation: https://mesa.readthedocs.io/
License: Apache 2.0
Latest release: 3.2.0
published 8 months ago

Versions: 79
Dependent Packages: 7
Dependent Repositories: 137
Downloads: 38,432 Last month

Rankings

Dependent packages count: 1.1%

Dependent repos count: 1.3%

Forks count: 1.5%

Stargazers count: 1.6%

Average: 1.6%

Downloads: 2.5%

Maintainers (5)

rht jackiekazil tpike3 boyuw EwoutH

Last synced: 4 months ago

proxy.golang.org: github.com/projectmesa/mesa

Documentation: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/projectmesa/mesa#section-documentation
License: apache-2.0
Latest release: v3.2.0+incompatible
published 8 months ago

Versions: 53
Dependent Packages: 0
Dependent Repositories: 0

Rankings

Forks count: 1.0%

Stargazers count: 1.4%

Average: 3.4%

Dependent packages count: 5.4%

Dependent repos count: 5.7%

Last synced: 4 months ago

conda-forge.org: mesa

Mesa is an open-source Python library for agent-based modeling, ideal for simulating complex systems and exploring emergent behaviors.

Homepage: https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa
License: Apache-2.0
Latest release: 1.1.1
published about 3 years ago

Versions: 8
Dependent Packages: 2
Dependent Repositories: 3

Rankings

Forks count: 5.9%

Stargazers count: 9.2%

Average: 13.1%

Dependent repos count: 17.9%

Dependent packages count: 19.6%

Last synced: 4 months ago

pypi.org: epsteinsovereigncitizens

A spatial alteration to Epstein's civil violence model

Documentation: https://epsteinsovereigncitizens.readthedocs.io/
License: Apache 2.0
Latest release: 1.0.1
published 6 months ago

Versions: 2
Dependent Packages: 0
Dependent Repositories: 0
Downloads: 15 Last month

Rankings

Dependent packages count: 8.9%

Average: 29.6%

Dependent repos count: 50.2%

Maintainers (1)

pluumenbrownie

Last synced: 4 months ago

Dependencies

Pipfile pypi

pytest * develop
pytest-cov * develop
mesa *

Pipfile.lock pypi

attrs ==21.4.0 develop
coverage ==6.4 develop
iniconfig ==1.1.1 develop
packaging ==21.3 develop
pluggy ==1.0.0 develop
py ==1.11.0 develop
pyparsing ==3.0.9 develop
pytest ==7.1.2 develop
pytest-cov ==3.0.0 develop
tomli ==2.0.1 develop
arrow ==1.2.2
binaryornot ==0.4.4
certifi ==2022.5.18.1
chardet ==4.0.0
charset-normalizer ==2.0.12
click ==8.1.3
cookiecutter ==2.1.0
idna ==3.3
jinja2 ==3.1.2
jinja2-time ==0.2.0
markupsafe ==2.1.1
mesa ==0.9.0
networkx ==2.8.2
numpy ==1.22.4
pandas ==1.4.2
python-dateutil ==2.8.2
python-slugify ==6.1.2
pytz ==2022.1
pyyaml ==6.0
requests ==2.27.1
six ==1.16.0
text-unidecode ==1.3
tornado ==6.1
tqdm ==4.64.0
urllib3 ==1.26.9

.github/workflows/build_lint.yml actions

actions/cache v3 composite
actions/checkout v3 composite
actions/setup-python v4 composite
codecov/codecov-action v3 composite

.github/workflows/codespell.yml actions

actions/checkout v3 composite
codespell-project/actions-codespell master composite

.github/workflows/release.yml actions

actions/checkout v3 composite
actions/setup-python v4 composite
actions/upload-artifact v3 composite
pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish release/v1 composite

Dockerfile docker

python 3.10-slim build

docker-compose.yml docker

mesa dev

Mesa 3

Science Score: 100.0%

Keywords

Keywords from Contributors

Scientific Fields

Repository

Basic Info

Statistics

Topics

Metadata Files

README.md

Mesa: Agent-based modeling in Python

Features

Using Mesa

You can customize the additional dependencies you need, if you want. Available are:

This is equivalent to our recommended dependencies:

To install all, including developer, dependencies:

Resources

Running Mesa in Docker

If you want to make it run in the background, you instead run

Contributing to Mesa

Citing Mesa

Owner

JOSS Publication

Mesa 3: Agent-based modeling with Python in 2025

Authors

Editor

Tags

Citation (CITATION.cff)

GitHub Events

Total

Last Year

Committers

All Time

Past Year

Top Committers

Committer Domains (Top 20 + Academic)

Issues and Pull Requests

All Time

Past Year

Top Authors

Issue Authors

Pull Request Authors

Top Labels

Issue Labels

Pull Request Labels

Packages

pypi.org: mesa

Rankings

Maintainers (5)

proxy.golang.org: github.com/projectmesa/mesa

Rankings

conda-forge.org: mesa

Rankings

pypi.org: epsteinsovereigncitizens

Rankings

Maintainers (1)

Dependencies