The Olympic Peninsula ABM works as a virtual laboratory to simulate the existing forestland management practices as followed by different forestland owner groups in the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, and explore how they could shape the future provisions of multifunctional ecosystem services such as Carbon storage and revenue generation under the business-as-usual scenario as well as by their adaptation to interventions. Forestlands are socio-ecological systems that interact with economic, socio-cultural, and policy systems. Two intervention scenarios were introduced in this model to simulate the adaptation of landowner behavior and test the efficacy of policy instruments in promoting sustainable forest practices and fostering Carbon storage and revenue generation. (1) A market-linked carbon offset scheme that pays the forestland owners a financial incentive in the form of a yearly carbon rent. (2) An institutional intervention policy that allows small forest owners (SFLO) to cooperate for increased market access and benefits under carbon rent scenario. The model incorporates the heterogeneous contexts within which the forestland owners operate and make their forest management decisions by parameterizing relevant agent attributes and contextualizing their unique decision-making processes.

This model is an agent-based simulation designed to explore how climate-induced environmental degradation can contribute to the emergence of social violence in coastal communities that depend heavily on ecosystem services for their livelihoods. The model represents a coupled social–ecological system in which environmental shocks—such as sea level rise and marine ecosystem decline—affect local economic conditions, food security, and community stability.

Agents in the model represent individuals whose livelihoods depend on coastal ecosystems. Environmental degradation reduces ecosystem productivity and increases economic hardship, which can lead to the formation of grievances among agents. The model incorporates behavioral thresholds that determine how individuals respond to hardship and perceived injustice. Under certain conditions—particularly when institutional capacity and law enforcement effectiveness are limited—these grievances may escalate into violent behavior.

The simulation allows users to explore how different climate scenarios, levels of ecosystem degradation, livelihood dependence, and institutional responses influence the probability of social instability and violence. By modeling the interactions between environmental stress, socio-economic vulnerability, and governance capacity, the model provides a computational framework for examining potential pathways linking climate change and conflict in coastal social–ecological systems.

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The Axelrod’s model of cultural dissemination is an agent-model designed to investigate the dissemination of culture among interacting agents on a society.

This model visualizes gradient descent optimization - the fundamental algorithm used to train neural networks and other machine learning models. Agents represent different optimization algorithms searching for the minimum of a loss landscape (the “error surface” that ML models try to minimize during training).

The model demonstrates how different optimizer types (SGD, Momentum with different parameters) behave on various loss landscapes, from simple bowls to the notoriously difficult Rosenbrock “banana valley” function. This helps build intuition about why certain optimization algorithms work better than others for different problem geometries.

HOW IT WORKS

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Schelling and Sakoda prominently proposed computational models suggesting that strong ethnic residential segregation can be the unintended outcome of a self-reinforcing dynamic driven by choices of individuals with rather tolerant ethnic preferences. There are only few attempts to apply this view to school choice, another important arena in which ethnic segregation occurs. In the current paper, we explore with an agent-based theoretical model similar to those proposed for residential segregation, how ethnic tolerance among parents can affect the level of school segregation. More specifically, we ask whether and under which conditions school segregation could be reduced if more parents hold tolerant ethnic preferences. We move beyond earlier models of school segregation in three ways. First, we model individual school choices using a random utility discrete choice approach. Second, we vary the pattern of ethnic segregation in the residential context of school choices systematically, comparing residential maps in which segregation is unrelated to parents’ level of tolerance to residential maps reflecting their ethnic preferences. Third, we introduce heterogeneity in tolerance levels among parents belonging to the same group. Our simulation experiments suggest that ethnic school segregation can be a very robust phenomenon, occurring even when about half of the population prefers mixed to segregated schools. However, we also identify a “sweet spot” in the parameter space in which a larger proportion of tolerant parents makes the biggest difference. This is the case when parents have moderate preferences for nearby schools and there is only little residential segregation. Further experiments are presented that unravel the underlying mechanisms.

Cooperation is essential for all domains of life. Yet, ironically, it is intrinsically vulnerable to exploitation by cheats. Hence, an explanatory necessity spurs many evolutionary biologists to search for mechanisms that could support cooperation. In general, cooperation can emerge and be maintained when cooperators are sufficiently interacting with themselves. This communication provides a kind of assortment and reciprocity. The most crucial and common mechanisms to achieve that task are kin selection, spatial structure, and enforcement (punishment). Here, we used agent-based simulation models to investigate these pivotal mechanisms against conditional defector strategies. We concluded that the latter could easily violate the former and take over the population. This surprising outcome may urge us to rethink the evolution of cooperation, as it illustrates that maintaining cooperation may be more difficult than previously thought. Moreover, empirical applications may support these theoretical findings, such as invading the cooperator population of pathogens by genetically engineered conditional defectors, which could be a potential therapy for many incurable diseases.

This model expands approaches from social practice theories and is used to investigate the ability of the underlying conceptual model to explain the emergence of social practices, defined as routine behaviour that is similar amoung peers.

This model is to simulate and compare the admission effects of 3 school matching mechanisms, serial dictatorship, Boston mechanism, and Chinese Parallel, under different settings of information released.

Models the connection between health agency communication, personal protective behaviour (eg vaccination, hand hygiene) and influenza transmission.

An agent-based model for the emigration of highly-skilled labour.

We hypothesise that there are two main factors that impact the decision and ability to move abroad: desire to maximise individual utility and network effects. Accordingly, several factors play role in brain drain such as the overall economic and social differences between the home and host countries, people’s ability and capacity to obtain good jobs and start a life abroad, the barriers of moving abroad, and people’s social network who are already working abroad.