custom solutions for real-world value

Our Approach

If your company or organization is interested in exploring agent-based modeling and related modeling and optimization techniques, Metascape is an ideal partner. Our attitude is real-world -- we're professionals with decades of experience in the field, but you'll also find us accessible and hype-free. Our goal is to benefit you while focussing on our core competencies (which means telling you when our approaches aren't the best fit for your needs). We're proud of our long track record of exceeding customer expectations, based on the core philosophy of "under-promising and over-delivering".

One of our passions is to enable customers to build expertise and to do things for themselves. We also love to work hard solving unique and difficult challenges and explaining and implementing those solutions for you. We can augment your existing approaches with novel capabilities. Finally, if your organization can benefit from a complete solution, we'll put everything we have into delighting you with the results. Because our work is specialized and unique, we work closely with an exceptional group of corporate, academic and institutional partners. Working together, we can provide you with decades of collective experience in integrating cutting edge science with your existing organizational and technological infrastructure. Regardless of how you choose to work with us, we'll provide on-going guidance and direct access to the leading experts in the agent-based modeling, complexity science and optimization communities. With that in mind, let's discuss our real-world solutions in real-world terms.

Training and Mentoring

If you're interested in developing your own in-house competencies in modeling real-world problem domains, we can be of real benefit. This can also be a good way to give your in-house research people a strong introduction to our technologies and approaches, affording you a chance to make a well-informed decision about the potential value of our offerings to your organization. As they represent a great opportunity for us to get to know you and your organization's needs -- and for you to understand how we can meet them -- we offer in-house training workshops at a cost that's quite workable for most organizations. A typical 3-5 day workshop will be in the range of $5,000-7,500. See below for a standard offering -- and please let us know if you'd like a custom quote.

Initial Engagements

This is often a particularly suitable approach for a company interested in agent modeling approaches but understandably unwilling to invest significant resources in a novel technology. In fact, we recommend this approach in most situations. A typical pilot project will cost in the range of $20,000 - $30,000. And while we'll work hard to qualify your needs before beginning any engagement, if at the end of this pilot project -- or any phase of our relationship -- we can't establish further value, we'll be clear about that too. But in our experience we're usually able to establish an immediate ROI or a clear opportunity for such a return within a well defined time-line.

Phased Issue Focussed Engagements

Based on what we discover in the initial assessment and engagement, Metascape will work with you to design an approach that fits your goals and resources. This may mean a complete custom solution targeted to your business needs, a one-off model exploring a business domain and complex decision-making landscapes, or something in between. Then, Metascape will work with you to develop an energetic but realistic schedule for follow-on phases of work. Many customer engagements have been in the $100,000-$300,000 range, for which we're able to commit significant resources and demonstrate significant value. And for larger scale needs, Metascape consultants have managed much more significant efforts, demonstrating exceptional returns on investment. We do believe that there is an upper limit on the size of an effective effort, discounting integration costs. We'd be happy to discuss your needs with you in order to provide a realistic first order assessment of potential overall costs.

Methodology

For every phase of every engagement, we define clear metrics for success, while building in flexibility to adapt to changes in customer priorities or newly discovered opportunities. We're strongly committed to agile software development methodologies -- in real-terms that means that our processes are customer-driven, transparent, robust and high-value. In fact, we're doing pioneering work in applying agile approaches to agent-based modeling techniques and tools. For example, our Escape tool includes tools for regression validation and verification of models using unit-testing. We use the latest and best practices for software development, including providing direct customer access to issue tracking, planning, build management and other services. Our solutions are designed to work without us, and we'll never lock you into a proprietary solution. We're committed to Open Source, Open Development and Open Standards -- in fact we've put many person-years into open source efforts. The best evidence of that is our leadership of and dedication to the Eclipse Agent Modeling Project and to the Eclipse ecosystem as a whole. Of course, if you're stuck with proprietary software and hardware, we'll work with that too!

Jump start program

A great way to fully explore the potential of agent-based modeling and related technologies with minimal cost is to engage with us in a week-long "jump-start". Jump-starts work best with a small group of people comprising organization domain experts, in-house developers and management. A leading ABM developer will work with you on ABM concepts and together we'll build a working model relevant to your organization's real-world challenges, using best-of-class tools. Our jump-start includes:

• 3 hours pre-visit phone consultation setting overall goals for an initial pilot project.

• 4 1/2 days on-site:

  • Introduction to ABM and Complex Systems
  • Introduction to ABM tools
  • In-depth tutorials
  • Iterative and cooperative model development
• 5 hours follow-up development and support.

We offer this package at $7,000 + direct travel costs as we're pretty confident that you'll want to continue working with us after our initial engagement. Of course, we can customize packages to address different levels of expertise and audiences.

Non-profit, Academic and Foundation Partnerships

We're committed to bringing the insights and capabilities of our toolsets to organizations that may not normally be able to afford higher-end consulting. We are also always interested in engaging with government and research institutions on longer term projects that can support the development of open tools. Therefore, whenever our overall project schedule permits we offer special rates for academic institutions and non-profits.

We'd love to hear from you!

We offer this realistic look at potential costs and benefits on our website because we want you to be able to have a clear view of the landscape up front. We enjoy discussing important challenges, and regardless of wether you end up being a customer, we'd love to help you figure out wether agent modeling and related approaches can be of benefit to you. If you think they might, or you would like to tell us about other information that you'd like us to make available online, please give us a call at (509) 643-4441 or send us an email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it