Project MWGRID: Medieval Warfare on the Grid
Distributed Agent-based Simulation for the Humanities
MWGrid was one of
the seven strategic research projects funded by the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC
e-Science Intitiative to pioneer the research agenda of the Arts
and Humanities e-Science programme in the UK. Details
of the project are provided by UKRI here.
The project sought to
address the problems associated with early military logistics
through agent-based modelling and distributed simulations. The
need for medieval states to collect and distribute resources to
maintain armies affected all aspects of political organisation and
at critical times, when armies failed, the results could prove
disastrous to society. Despite this, military studies seldom
progress past the study of existing texts to bear out the
pragmatic consequences of military behaviour, even though military
activity in terms of resource allocation and consumption is
decisive in shaping pre-modern societies. MWGrid explored
the military-logistical context of the Battle
of Manzikert in 1071.Manzikert is a key historic event in
Byzantine history. The defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuk
Turks, and the following civil war, resulted in the collapse of
Byzantine power in central Anatolia. Given the key position this
event takes within the collapse of Byzantine power, the lack of
consensus between historians on the numbers of men involved at, or
even the route taken by the Byzantine Army to, Manzikert is
profound.
The results of the
project have had significant implications for study of
pre-industrial societies in methodological and theoretical terms
and will benefit academics with an interest in comparative
military history, the cultural role of military organisation and
the relationship of historical and modelled data.
The project also
explored new infrastructures and algorithms for constructing and
executing very large Multi-Agent models, including
the PDES-MAS platform.
People
Principal Investigators
Research Staff
Media coverage
- BBC History Magazine, July 2009
- MIT
Technology Review
- Digital Classicist
- Volkskrant, the Netherlands
- Science
Node
Publicity material
- A
Video: Philip Murgatroyd and Rob Minson talk
about the project.
- Posters: Poster
1, Poster
2
- Some
animations: 1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,
7
Events
- The prestigious Annual Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium (Friday, April 30th–Sunday, May 2nd, 2010) dedicated a special session on the MWGrid Project. Here is the group photo.
- Trans-disciplinary Workshop on Agents in Archaeology, Natural History Museum, Vienna, 2-4 March 2011, Vienna, Austria.
- Universitas 21 Digital Heritage “Cultural Heritage and Technology”, Birmingham UK, 15-17 September 2010
- Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative
workshop, King’s College London 23 July 2010.
- Access to the Grid: Interfacing the Humanities with Grid Technologies, Digital Humanities 2010 Conference, King's College London, 5 July 2010.
Book
- Philip Murgatroyd, Vincent Gaffney, John Haldon, Georgios Theodoropoulos, “Model-ling the Logistics of Mantzikert”, Archaeopress, Oxford, forthcoming
Publications
- John Haldon, Vince Gaffney, Philip Murgatroyd and Georgios
Theodoropoulos, "Marching Across Anatolia - Medieval
Logistics and Modeling the Mantzikert Campaign", Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 65/66, ISBN
9780884023876,
February 2013. (buy on Amazon).
- Gaffney, V., P. Murgatroyd, B. Craenen, and G. Theodoropoulos, “Only Individuals”: Moving the Byzantine Army to Manzikert. In Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement, no. 122, 2013, pp. 25–43. JSTOR,Oxford University Press
- Bart Craenen, Vinoth Suryanarayanan, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Vincent Gaffney, Philip Murgatroyd, John Haldon, , "Modelling Medieval Military Logistics: An Agent-based Simulation of a Byzantine Army on the March", the Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT), Springer Publishing, Special Issue on “Agent Directed Simulation”, DOI Bookmark: 10.1007/s10588-011-9103-9
- Bart Craenen, Vinoth Suryanarayanan, Vincent Gaffney, Philip Murgatroyd, and Georgios Theodoropoulos. 2012. MWGrid: distributed agent-based simulation in the digital humanities. In Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC '12). Winter Simulation Conference, Article 376, 1–2. DOI bookmark: 10.5555/2429759.2430250
- Bart Craenen, Philip Murgatroyd, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Vincent Gaffney, Vinoth Suryanarayanan, “MWGrid: A System for Distributed Agent-based Simulation in the Digital Humanities”, 16th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT'12), October 2012, Dublin, Ireland. ISBN: 978-0-7695-4846-3. DOI bookmark: 10.1109/DS-RT.2012.24
- Bart Craenen, Vinoth Suryanarayanan, Georgios Theodoropoulos, Vincent Gaffney, Philip Murgatroyd, John Haldon, "Medieval Military Logistics: A Case for Distributed Agent-based Simulation", Distributed Simulation & Online Gaming (DISIO), in conjunction with SIMUTools 2010, SCS/ICST/CREATE-NET Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain - March 15, 2010. DOI Bookmark: 10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2010.8737
