MERCURY aims to represent and explore two descriptive models of the functioning of the Roman trade system that aim to explain the observed strong differences in the wideness of distributions of Roman tableware.

This model examines the potential impact of market collapse on the economy and demography of fishing households in the Logone Floodplain, Cameroon.

The purpose of the model is to explore the influence of actor behaviour, combined with environment and business model design, on the survival rates of Industrial Symbiosis Networks (ISN), and the cash flows of the agents. We define an ISN to be robust, when it is able to run for 10 years, without falling apart due to leaving agents.

The model simulates the implementation of local waste exchange collaborations for compost production, through the ISN implementation stages of awareness, planning, negotiation, implementation, and evaluation.

One central firm plays the role of waste processor in a local composting initiative. This firm negotiates with other firms to become a supplier of their organic residual streams. The waste suppliers in the model can decide to join the initiative, or to have the waste brought to the external waste incinerator. The focal point of the model are the company-level interactions during the implementation or ending of synergies.

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The MeReDiem model aims to simulate the effect of socio-agricultural practices of farmers and pastors on the food sustainability and soil fertility of a serrer village, in Senegal. The model is a central part of a companion modeling and exploration approach, described in a paper, currently under review)

The village population is composed of families (kitchens). Kitchens cultivate their land parcels to feed their members, aiming for food security at the family level. On a global level , the village tries to preserve the community fallow land as long as possible.

Kitchens sizes vary depending on the kitchens food production, births and migration when food is insufficient.
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The Non-Deterministic model of affordable housing Negotiations (NoD-Neg) is designed for generating hypotheses about the possible outcomes of negotiating affordable housing obligations in new developments in England. By outcomes we mean, the probabilities of failing the negotiation and/or the different possibilities of agreement.
The model focuses on two negotiations which are key in the provision of affordable housing. The first is between a developer (DEV) who is submitting a planning application for approval and the relevant Local Planning Authority (LPA) who is responsible for reviewing the application and enforcing the affordable housing obligations. The second negotiation is between the developer and a Registered Social Landlord (RSL) who buys the affordable units from the developer and rents them out. They can negotiate the price of selling the affordable units to the RSL.
The model runs the two negotiations on the same development project several times to enable agents representing stakeholders to apply different negotiation tactics (different agendas and concession-making tactics), hence, explore the different possibilities of outcomes.
The model produces three types of outputs: (i) histograms showing the distribution of the negotiation outcomes in all the simulation runs and the probability of each outcome; (ii) a data file with the exact values shown in the histograms; and (iii) a conversation log detailing the exchange of messages between agents in each simulation run.

The Hohokam Trade Networks Model focuses on key features of the Hohokam economy to explore how differences in trade network topologies may show up in the archaeological record. The model is set in the Phoenix Basin of central Arizona, AD 200-1450.

This multi-model (i.e. a model composed of interacting submodels) is a multi-level representation of a collective motion phenomenon. It was designed to study the impact of the mutual influences between individuals and groups in collective motion.

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.

This adaptation of the Relative Agreement model of opinion dynamics (Deffuant et al. 2002) extends the Meadows and Cliff (2012) implementation of this model in a manner that explores the effect of the network structure among the agents.

Our Hybrid Climate Assessment Model (HCAM) aims to simulate the behaviours of individuals under the influence of climate change and external policy makings. In our proposed solution we use System Dynamics (SD) modelling to represent the physical and economic environments. Agent-Based (AB) modelling is used to represent collections of individuals that can interact with other collections of individuals and the environment. In turn, individual agents are endowed with an internal SD model to track their psychological state used for decision making. In this paper we address the feasibility of such a scalable hybrid approach as a proof-of-concept. This novel approach allows us to reuse existing rigid, but well-established Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), and adds more flexibility by replacing aggregate stocks with a community of vibrant interacting entities.

Our illustrative example takes the settings of the U.S., a country that contributes to the majority of the global carbon footprints and that is the largest economic power in the world. The model considers the carbon emission dynamics of individual states and its relevant economic impacts on the nation over time.

Please note that the focus of the model is on a methodological advance rather than on applying it for predictive purposes! More details about the HCAM are provided in the forthcoming JASSS paper “An Innovative Approach to Multi-Method Integrated Assessment Modelling of Global Climate Change”, which is available upon request from the authors (contact [email protected]).