Computational Model Library

Displaying 10 of 170 results reviewed clear search

Peer reviewed Credit and debt market of low-income families

Márton Gosztonyi | Published Tuesday, December 12, 2023 | Last modified Friday, January 19, 2024

The purpose of the Credit and debt market of low-income families model is to help the user examine how the financial market of low-income families works.

The model is calibrated based on real-time data which was collected in a small disadvantaged village in Hungary it contains 159 households’ social network and attributes data.
The simulation models the households’ money liquidity, expenses and revenue structures as well as the formal and informal loan institutions based on their network connections. The model forms an intertwined system integrated in the families’ local socioeconomic context through which families handle financial crises and overcome their livelihood challenges from one month to another.
The simulation-based on the abstract model of low-income families’ financial survival system at the bottom of the pyramid, which was described in following the papers:

Peer reviewed Visibility of archaeological social networks

Claudine Gravel-Miguel | Published Sunday, November 26, 2023

The purpose of this model is to explore the impact of combining archaeological palimpsests with different methods of cultural transmission on the visibility of prehistoric social networks. Up until recently, Paleolithic archaeologists have relied on stylistic similarities of artifacts to reconstruct social networks. However, this method - which is successfully applied to more recent ceramic assemblages - may not be applicable to Paleolithic assemblages, as several of those consist of palimpsests of occupations. Therefore, this model was created to study how palimpsests of occupation affect our social network reconstructions.

The model simplifies inter-groups interactions between populations who share cultural traits as they produce artifacts. It creates a proxy archaeological record of artifacts with stylistic traits that can then be used to reconstruct interactions. One can thus use this model to compare the networks reconstructed through stylistic similarities with direct contact.

Peer reviewed Avian pest control: Yield outcome due to insectivorous birds, falconry, and integration of nest boxes.

David Jung | Published Monday, November 13, 2023 | Last modified Sunday, November 19, 2023

The model aims to simulate predator-prey relationships in an agricultural setting. The focus lies on avian communities and their effect on different pest organisms (here: pest birds, rodents, and arthropod pests). Since most case studies focused on the impact on arthropod pests (AP) alone, this model attempts to include effects on yield outcome. By incorporating three treatments with different factor levels (insectivorous bird species, falconry, nest box density) an experimental setup is given that allows for further statistical analysis to identify an optimal combination of the treatments.
In light of a global decline of birds, insects, and many other groups of organisms, alternative practices of pest management are heavily needed to reduce the input of pesticides. Avian pest control therefore poses an opportunity to bridge the disconnect between humans and nature by realizing ecosystem services and emphasizing sustainable social ecological systems.

This research article presents an agent-based simulation hereinafter called COMMONSIM. It builds on COMMONISM, i.e. a large-scale commons-based vision for a utopian society. In this society, production and distribution of means are not coordinated via markets, exchange, and money, or a central polity, but via bottom-up signalling and polycentric networks, i.e. ex-ante coordination via needs. Heterogeneous agents care for each other in life groups and produce in different groups care, environmental as well as intermediate and final means to satisfy sensual-vital needs. Productive needs decide on the magnitude of activity in groups for a common interest, e.g. the production of means in a multi-sectoral artificial economy. Agents share cultural traits identified by different behaviour: a propensity for egoism, leisure, environmentalism, and productivity. The narrative of this utopian society follows principles of critical psychology and sociology, complexity and evolution, the theory of commons, and critical political economy. The article presents the utopia and an agent-based study of it, with emphasis on culture-dependent allocation mechanisms and their social and economic implications for agents and groups.

Peer reviewed Yards

srailsback Emily Minor Soraida Garcia Philip Johnson | Published Thursday, November 02, 2023

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.

Peer reviewed ABM Overtourism Santa Marta

Janwar Moreno | Published Monday, October 23, 2023

This model presents the simulation model of a city in the context of overtourism. The study area is the city of Santa Marta in Colombia. The purpose is to illustrate the spatial and temporal distribution of population and tourists in the city. The simulation analyzes emerging patterns that result from the interaction between critical components in the touristic urban system: residents, urban space, touristic sites, and tourists. The model is an Agent-Based Model (ABM) with the GAMA software. Also, it used public input data from statistical centers, geographical information systems, tourist websites, reports, and academic articles. The ABM includes assessing some measures used to address overtourism. This is a field of research with a low level of analysis for destinations with overtourism, but the ABM model allows it. The results indicate that the city has a high risk of overtourism, with spatial and temporal differences in the population distribution, and it illustrates the effects of two management measures of the phenomenon on different scales. Another interesting result is the proposed tourism intensity indicator (OVsm), taking into account that the tourism intensity indicators used by the literature on overtourism have an overestimation of tourism pressures.

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.

According to the philosopher of science K. Popper “All life is problem solving”. Genetic algorithms aim to leverage Darwinian selection, a fundamental mechanism of biological evolution, so as to tackle various engineering challenges.
Flibs’NFarol is an Agent Based Model that embodies a genetic algorithm applied to the inherently ill-defined “El Farol Bar” problem. Within this context, a group of agents operates under bounded rationality conditions, giving rise to processes of self-organization involving, in the first place, efficiency in the exploitation of available resources. Over time, the attention of scholars has shifted to equity in resource distribution, as well. Nowadays, the problem is recognized as paradigmatic within studies of complex evolutionary systems.
Flibs’NFarol provides a platform to explore and evaluate factors influencing self-organized efficiency and fairness. The model represents agents as finite automata, known as “flibs,” and offers flexibility in modifying the number of internal flibs states, which directly affects their behaviour patterns and, ultimately, the diversity within populations and the complexity of the system.

This BNE-informed ABM ultimately aims to provide a more realistic description of complicated pedestrian behaviours especially in high-density and life-threatening situations. Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (BNE) was adopted to reproduce interactive decision-making process among rational and game-playing agents. The implementations of 3 behavioural models, which are Shortest Route (SR) model, Random Follow (RF) model, and BNE model, make it possible to simulate emergent patterns of pedestrian behaviours (e.g. herding and self-organised queuing behaviours, etc.) in emergency situations.

According to the common features of previous mass trampling accidents, a series of simulation experiments were performed in space with 3 types of barriers, which are Horizontal Corridors, Vertical Corridors, and Random Squares, standing for corridors, bottlenecks and intersections respectively, to investigate emergent behaviours of evacuees in varied constricted spatial environments. The output of this ABM has been available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/9v4byyvgxh/1.

Peer reviewed Co-adoption of low-carbon household energy technologies

Mart van der Kam Maria Lagomarsino Elie Azar Ulf Hahnel David Parra | Published Tuesday, August 29, 2023 | Last modified Friday, February 23, 2024

The model simulates the diffusion of four low-carbon energy technologies among households: photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, and home batteries. We model household decision making as the decision marking of one person, the agent. The agent decides whether to adopt these technologies. Hereby, the model can be used to study co-adoption behaviour, thereby going beyond traditional diffusion models that focus on the adop-tion of single technologies. The combination of these technologies is of particular interest be-cause (1) using the energy generated by PV solar panels for EVs and heat pumps can reduce emissions associated with transport and heating, respectively, and (2) EVs, heat pumps, and home batteries can help to integrate PV solar panels in local electricity grids by offering flexible demand (EVs and heat pumps) and energy storage (home batteries and EVs), thereby reducing grid impacts and associated upgrading costs.

The purpose of the model is to represent realistic adoption and co-adoption behaviour. This is achieved by grounding the decision model on the risks-as-feelings model (Loewenstein et al., 2001), theory from environmental and social psychology, and empirically informing agent be-haviour by survey-data among 1469 people in the Swiss region Romandie.

The model can be used to construct scenarios for the diffusion of the four low-carbon energy technologies depending on different contexts, and as a virtual experimentation environment for ex ante evaluation of policy interventions to stimulate adoption and co-adoption.

Displaying 10 of 170 results reviewed clear search

This website uses cookies and Google Analytics to help us track user engagement and improve our site. If you'd like to know more information about what data we collect and why, please see our data privacy policy. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.
Accept