A good software for agent based modelling?
My boss is a big fan of Repast HPC, but since Repast is a C++ framework it might not be the right choice for you. It takes a loooong time to write a good C++ program (even for someone who already knows the language fairly well), although it will run very quickly once it's written. A one or even two year long Master's program will end up going by surprisingly quickly, so if I was in your shoes I'd choose to start with the simplest thing possible (ie Netlogo). Once you have a finished product, even if it's somewhat more simplistic than you'd like, it'll be much easier to work your way up from there.

Really though, consider the choice of modeling framework to be part of your research project! Only you can come up with the right choice for your project, though as a practical matter you should heavily favor any framework that at least one person in your department already has some experience using. Things will go wrong, you will have questions, and Stack Overflow won't be able to answer all of them. 

Here's a list of the more interesting agent-based modeling frameworks that I found from a few minutes of googling:


Repast HPC


pros:


C++ based
The only performance focused one of the bunch

cons:


C++ based
For simple models, would be like building a supercomputer to use as a pocket calculator


Netlogo


pros:


Focused on being accessible to non-programmers
Scripting language seems pretty straightforward

cons:


In my experience frameworks that try to implement their own scripting language in an attempt to be accessible to non-programmers ultimately end up being much more complicated to use than frameworks based around an established language. But I'm not the target audience.


Mesa


This one is Python based, so it's the one I would personally try first since I find Python to be the best language for quickly writing scientific programs of reasonable complexity. That's my own personal bias, so your mileage may vary

MASON