The command and control policy in natural resource management, including water resources, is a longstanding established policy that has been theoretically and practically argued from the point of view of social-ecological complex systems. With the intention of making a system ecologically resilient, these days, policymakers apply the top-down policies of controlling communities through regulations. To explore how these policies may work and to understand whether the ecological goal can be achieved via command and control policy, this research uses the capacity of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as an experimental platform in the Urmia Lake Basin (ULB) in Iran, which is a social-ecological complex system and has gone through a drought process.

Despite the uncertainty of the restorability capacity of the lake, there has been a consensus on the possibility to artificially restore the lake through the nationally managed Urmia Lake Restoratoin Program (ULRP). To reduce water consumption in the Basin, the ULRP widely targets the agricultural sector and proposes the project of changing crop patterns from high-water-demand (HWD) to low-water-demand (LWD), which includes a component to control water consumption by establishing water-police forces.

Using a wide range of multidisciplinary studies about Urmia Lake at the Basin and sub-basins as well as qualitative information at micro-level as the main conceptual sources for the ABM, the findings under different strategies indicate that targeting crop patterns change by legally limiting farmers’ access to water could force farmers to change their crop patterns for a short period of time as long as the number of police constantly increases. However, it is not a sustainable policy for either changing the crop patterns nor restoring the lake.

Knowledge Space model of Opinion Dynamics.

In CmLab we explore the implications of the phenomenon of Conservation of Money in a modern economy. This is one of a series of models exploring the dynamics of sustainable economics – PSoup, ModEco, EiLab, OamLab, MppLab, TpLab, CmLab.

This model makes it possible to explore how network clustering and resistance to changing existing status beliefs might affect the spontaneous emergence and diffusion of such beliefs as described by status construction theory.

We expose RA agent-based model of the opinion and tolerance dynamics in artificial societies. The formal mathematical model is based on the ideas of Social Influence, Social Judgment, and Social Identity theories.

The model explores how two types of information - social (in the form of pheromone trails) and private (in the form of route memories) affect ant colony level foraging in a variable enviroment.

Objective of our model is to simulate the emergence and operation of a technological niches (TN) in terms of actors’ interaction. A TN can be conceived as protected socio-economic space where radical innovations are developed and tested

In the context switching model, a society of agents embedded in multiple social relations, engages in a simple abstract game: the consensus game. Each agent has to choose towards one of two possible choices which are basically arbitrary. The objective of the game is to reach a global consensus, but the particular choice that gets collectively selected is irrelevant.

This model contains source code and a technical appendix for the paper “Effects of Resource Availability on Consensus Decision Making in Primates”.