The SAFIRe model (Simulation of Agents for Fertility, Integrated Energy, Food Security, and Reforestation) is an agent-based model co-developed with rural communities in Senegal’s Groundnut Basin. Its purpose is to explore how local farming and pastoral practices affect the regeneration of Faidherbia albida trees, which are essential for maintaining soil fertility and supporting food security through improved millet production. The model supports collective reflection on how different social and ecological factors interact, particularly around firewood demand, livestock pressure, and agricultural intensification.

The model simulates a 100-hectare agricultural landscape where agents (farmers, shepherds, woodcutters, and supervisors) interact with trees, land parcels, and each other. It incorporates seasonality, crop rotation, tree growth and cutting, livestock feeding behaviors, and farmers’ engagement in sapling protection through Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR). Two types of surveillance strategies are compared: community-led monitoring and delegated surveillance by forestry authorities. Farmer engagement evolves over time based on peer influence, meeting participation, and the success of visible tree regeneration efforts.

SAFIRe integrates participatory modeling (ComMod and ComExp) and a backcasting approach (ACARDI) to co-produce scenarios rooted in local aspirations. It was explored using the OpenMole platform, allowing stakeholders to test a wide range of future trajectories and analyze the sensitivity of key parameters (e.g., discussion frequency, time in fields). The model’s outcomes not only revealed unexpected insights—such as the hidden role of farmers in tree loss—but also led to real-world actions, including community nursery creation and behavioral shifts toward tree care. SAFIRe illustrates how agent-based modeling can become a tool for social learning and collective action in socio-ecological systems.

This model examines language dynamics within a social network using simulation techniques to represent the interplay of language adoption, social influence, economic incentives, and language policies. The agent-based model (ABM) focuses on interactions between agents endowed with specific linguistic attributes, who engage in communication based on predefined rules. A key feature of our model is the incorporation of network analysis, structuring agent relationships as a dynamic network and leveraging network metrics to capture the evolving inter-agent connections over time. This integrative approach provides nuanced insights into emergent behaviors and system dynamics, offering an analytical framework that extends beyond traditional modeling approaches. By combining agent-based modeling with network analysis, the model sheds light on the underlying mechanisms governing complex language systems and can be effectively paired with sociolinguistic observational data.

Sahelian transhumance is a seasonal pastoral mobility between the transhumant’s terroir of origin and one or more host terroirs. Sahelian transhumance can last several months and extend over hundreds of kilometers. Its purpose is to ensure efficient and inexpensive feeding of the herd’s ruminants. This paper describes an agent-based model to determine the spatio-temporal distribution of Sahelian transhumant herds and their impact on vegetation. Three scenarios based on different values of rainfall and the proportion of vegetation that can be grazed by transhumant herds are simulated. The results of the simulations show that the impact of Sahelian transhumant herds on vegetation is not significant and that rainfall does not impact the alley phase of transhumance. The beginning of the rainy season has a strong temporal impact on the spatial distribution of transhumant herds during the return phase of transhumance.

The agent-based simulation of innovation diffusion is based on the idea of the Bass model (1969).

The adoption of an agent is driven two parameters: its innovativess p and its prospensity to conform with others. The model is designed for a computational experiment building up on the following four model variations:

(i) the agent population it fully connected and all agents share the same parameter values for p and q
(ii) the agent population it fully connected and agents are heterogeneous, i.e. individual parameter values are drawn from a normal distribution
(iii) the agents population is embeded in a social network and all agents share the same parameter values for p and q
…

This agent-based model simulates the implementation of a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) mechanism in a stylized urban environment inspired by Dublin. It explores how developer agents interact with land parcels under spatial zoning, conservation protections, and incentive-based policy rules. The model captures emergent outcomes such as compact growth, green and heritage zone preservation, and public cost-efficiency. Built in NetLogo, the model enables experimentation with variable FSI bonuses, developer behavior, and spatial alignment of sending/receiving zones. It is intended as a policy sandbox to test market-aligned planning tools under behavioral and spatial uncertainty.

Protein 2.0 is a systems model of the Norwegian protein sector designed to explore the potential impacts of carbon taxation and the emergence of cultivated meat and dairy technologies. The model simulates production, pricing, and consumption dynamics across conventional and cultivated protein sources, accounting for emissions intensity, technological learning, economies of scale, and agent behaviour. It assesses how carbon pricing could alter the competitiveness of conventional beef, lamb, pork, chicken, milk, and egg production relative to emerging cultivated alternatives, and evaluates the implications for domestic production, emissions, and food system resilience. The model provides a flexible platform for exploring policy scenarios and transition pathways in protein supply. Further details can be found in the associated publication.

An unintended consequence of low cost maritime travel may be hyperconnectedness, creating social situations where information can be readily passed before it is verified- an issue not limited to modern digitally connected societies. In traditional Coast Salish societies, the peoples of what is now Western Washington and Southwestern British Columbia, oral traditions were vertified through a process called witnessing. Witnesses would be trained to recount and verify oral history and traditional teachings at high fidelity. Here, a simple model based on dual inheritance approaches to genes and culture, is used to compare this specific form of verifying socially important information compared to modern mass communication. The model suggests that witnessing is a high fidelity form of transmitting knowledge with a low error rate, more in line with modern apprenticeships than mass communication. Social mechanisms such as witnessing provide solutions to issues faced in contemporary discourse where the validity of information and even fact checking mechanisms may be biased or counterfactual. This effort also demonstrates the utillity of using modeling approaches to highlight how specific, historically contingent institutions such as witnesses can be drawn upon to model potential solutions to contemporary issues solved in the past in traditional Coast Salish practice.

The Agent-Based Model for Multiple Team Membership (ABMMTM) simulates design teams searching for viable design solutions, for a large design project that requires multiple design teams that are working simultaneously, under different organizational structures; specifically, the impact of multiple team membership (MTM). The key mechanism under study is how individual agent-level decision-making impacts macro-level project performance, specifically, wage cost. Each agent follows a stochastic learning approach, akin to simulated annealing or reinforcement learning, where they iteratively explore potential design solutions. The agent evaluates new solutions based on a random-walk exploration, accepting improvements while rejecting inferior designs. This iterative process simulates real-world problem-solving dynamics where designers refine solutions based on feedback.

As a proof-of-concept demonstration of assessing the macro-level effects of MTM in organizational design, we developed this agent-based simulation model which was used in a simulation experiment. The scenario is a system design project involving multiple interdependent teams of engineering designers. In this scenario, the required system design is split into three separate but interdependent systems, e.g., the design of a satellite could (trivially) be split into three components: power source, control system, and communication systems; each of three design team is in charge of a design of one of these components. A design team is responsible for ensuring its proposed component’s design meets the design requirement; they are not responsible for the design requirements of the other components. If the design of a given component does not affect the design requirements of the other components, we call this the uncoupled scenario; otherwise, it is a coupled scenario.

The Relation-Based Model (RBM) purpose is to operationalise (a form of) process-relational (PR) thinking to serve as a thinking tool for process-relational thinking among social-ecological system (SES) researchers. The development of this model itself has been a ‘Proof of concept’- exercise to see whether we actually represent process-relational thinking in a methodology that is entity-based (ABM).

The target of the agent-based model is to show the emergence, change and disappearance of fishing assemblages (focusing on processes of self-organisation) in a Mexican fishery using a process-relational view. From this view, a fishery is regarded as an assemblage in which fishing can be enabled, fishing can occur, and fish can be bought/sold. These core doings - or sub-assemblages or capacities - maintain the assemblage. Each (sub)assemblage reflects different actualisations of constellations of relations and elements (buyers, fishers, fuel, permits, vessels and wind). The RBM thereby reflects an artificial fishery in which agents (elements) and their links (relations) engage in (enabling) fishing and buying/selling.

The emergence of cooperation in human societies is often linked to environmental constraints, yet the specific conditions that promote cooperative behavior remain an open question. This study examines how resource unpredictability and spatial dispersion influence the evolution of cooperation using an agent-based model (ABM). Our simulations test the effects of rainfall variability and resource distribution on the survival of cooperative and non-cooperative strategies. The results show that cooperation is most likely to emerge when resources are patchy, widely spaced, and rainfall is unpredictable. In these environments, non-cooperators rapidly deplete local resources and face high mortality when forced to migrate between distant patches. In contrast, cooperators—who store and share resources—can better endure extended droughts and irregular resource availability. While rainfall stochasticity alone does not directly select for cooperation, its interaction with resource patchiness and spatial constraints creates conditions where cooperative strategies provide a survival advantage. These findings offer broader insights into how environmental uncertainty shapes social organization in resource-limited settings. By integrating ecological constraints into computational modeling, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the conditions that drive cooperation across diverse human and animal systems.