Due to the large extent of the Harz National Park, an accurate measurement of visitor numbers and their spatiotemporal distribution is not feasible. This model demonstrates the possibility to simulate the streams of visitors with ABM methodology.

This NetLogo model is an implementation of the mostly verbal (and graphic) model in Jarret Walker’s Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (2011). Walker’s discussion is in the chapter “Connections or Complexity?”. See especially figure 12-2, which is on page 151.

In “Connections or Complexity?”, Walker frames the matter as involving a choice between two conflicting goals. The first goal is to minimize connections, the need to make transfers, in a transit system. People naturally prefer direct routes. The second goal is to minimize complexity. Why? Well, read the chapter, but as a general proposition we want to avoid unnecessary complexity with its attendant operating characteristics (confusing route plans in the case of transit) and management and maintenance challenges. With complexity general comes degraded robustness and resilience.

How do we, how can we, choose between these conflicting goals? The grand suggestion here is that we only choose indirectly, implicitly. In the present example of connections versus complexity we model various alternatives and compare them on measures of performance (MoP) other than complexity or connections per se. The suggestion is that connections and complexity are indicators of, heuristics for, other MoPs that are more fundamental, such as cost, robustness, energy use, etc., and it is these that we at bottom care most about. (Alternatively, and not inconsistently, we can view connections and complexity as two of many MoPs, with the larger issue to be resolve in light of many MoPs, including but not limited to complexity and connections.) We employ modeling to get a handle on these MoPs. Typically, there will be several, taking us thus to a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) situation. That’s the big picture.

The model explores the impact of journal metrics (e.g., the notorious impact factor) on the perception that academics have of an article’s scientific value.

The Mobility Transition Model (MoTMo) is a large scale agent-based model to simulate the private mobility demand in Germany until 2035. Here, we publish a very much reduced version of this model (R-MoTMo) which is designed to demonstrate the basic modelling ideas; the aim is by abstracting from the (empirical, technological, geographical, etc.) details to examine the feed-backs of individual decisions on the socio-technical system.

This model looks at implications of author/referee interaction for quality and efficiency of peer review. It allows to investigate the importance of various reciprocity motives to ensure cooperation. Peer review is modelled as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. The model includes various simulation scenarios to test different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour and various indexes that measure quality and efficiency of evaluation […]

Ants in the genus Temnothorax use tandem runs (rather than pheromone trails) to recruit to food sources. This model explores the collective consequences of this linear recruitment (as opposed to highly nonlinear pheromone trails).

We used our model to test how different combinations of dominance interactions present in H. saltator could result in linear, despotic, or shared hierarchies.

We used a computer simulation to measure how well different network structures (fully connected, small world, lattice, and random) find and exploit resource peaks in a variable environment.

The model combines the two elements of disorganization and motivation to explore their impact on teams. Effects of disorganization on team task performance (problem solving)

This is model that simulates how multiple kinds of peer effects shape the diffusion of innovations through different types of social relationships.