This model is an extended version of the original MERCURY model (https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/ ) . It allows for experiments to be performed in which empirically informed population sizes of sites are included, that allow for the scaling of the number of tableware traders with the population of settlements, and for hypothesised production centres of four tablewares to be used in experiments.

Experiments performed with this population extension and substantive interpretations derived from them are published in:

Hanson, J.W. & T. Brughmans. In press. Settlement scale and economic networks in the Roman Empire, in T. Brughmans & A.I. Wilson (ed.) Simulating Roman Economies. Theories, Methods and Computational Models. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Inspired by the European project called GLODERS that thoroughly analyzed the dynamics of extortive systems, Bottom-up Adaptive Macroeconomics with Extortion (BAMERS) is a model to study the effect of extortion on macroeconomic aggregates through simulation. This methodology is adequate to cope with the scarce data associated to the hidden nature of extortion, which difficults analytical approaches. As a first approximation, a generic economy with healthy macroeconomics signals is modeled and validated, i.e., moderate inflation, as well as a reasonable unemployment rate are warranteed. Such economy is used to study the effect of extortion in such signals. It is worth mentioning that, as far as is known, there is no work that analyzes the effects of extortion on macroeconomic indicators from an agent-based perspective. Our results show that there is significant effects on some macroeconomics indicators, in particular, propensity to consume has a direct linear relationship with extortion, indicating that people become poorer, which impacts both the Gini Index and inflation. The GDP shows a marked contraction with the slightest presence of extortion in the economic system.

This model is a highly stylized land use model in the Clear Creek Watershed in Eastern Iowa, designed to illustrate the construction of stability landscapes within resilience theory.

This is a model of plant communities in urban and suburban residential neighborhoods. These plant communities are of interest because they provide many benefits to human residents and also provide habitat for wildlife such as birds and pollinators. The model was designed to explore the social factors that create spatial patterns in biodiversity in yards and gardens. In particular, the model was originally developed to determine whether mimicry behaviors–-or neighbors copying each other’s yard design–-could produce observed spatial patterns in vegetation. Plant nurseries and socio-economic constraints were also added to the model as other potential sources of spatial patterns in plant communities.

The idea for the model was inspired by empirical patterns of spatial autocorrelation that have been observed in yard vegetation in Chicago, Illinois (USA), and other cities, where yards that are closer together are more similar than yards that are farther apart. The idea is further supported by literature that shows that people want their yards to fit into their neighborhood. Currently, the yard attribute of interest is the number of plant species, or species richness. Residents compare the richness of their yards to the richness of their neighbors’ yards. If a resident’s yard is too different from their neighbors, the resident will be unhappy and change their yard to make it more similar.

The model outputs information about the diversity and identity of plant species in each yard. This can be analyzed to look for spatial autocorrelation patterns in yard diversity and to explore relationships between mimicry behaviors, yard diversity, and larger scale diversity.

The HUMan impact on LANDscapes (HUMLAND) model has been developed to track and quantify the intensity of different impacts on landscapes at the continental level. This agent-based model focuses on determining the most influential factors in the transformation of interglacial vegetation with a specific emphasis on burning organized by hunter-gatherers. HUMLAND integrates various spatial datasets as input and target for the agent-based model results. Additionally, the simulation incorporates recently obtained continental-scale estimations of fire return intervals and the speed of vegetation regrowth. The obtained results include maps of possible scenarios of modified landscapes in the past and quantification of the impact of each agent, including climate, humans, megafauna, and natural fires.

This article presents an agent-based model of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialize in particular phases of fabrics production. It reconstructs the web of communication between firms as they arrange production chains. In turn, production chains result in road traffic between the geographical areas on which the district extends. The reconstructed traffic exhibits a pattern that has been observed, but not foreseen, by policy makers.

A simple model to assess the effect of connectivity on interacting species (i.e. predator-prey type)

An empirically validated agent-based model of circular migration

This model is designed to investigate the impact of alternative policy approaches and changing land tenure dynamics on farmer adoption of conservation practices intended to increase the water quality.

Genetic algorithms try to solve a computational problem following some principles of organic evolution. This model has educational purposes; it can give us an answer to the simple arithmetic problem on how to find the highest natural number composed by a given number of digits. We approach the task using a genetic algorithm, where the candidate solutions to the problem are represented by agents, that in logo programming environment are usually known as “turtles”.