The purpose of this curricular model is to teach students the basics of modeling complex systems using agent-based modeling. It is a simple SIR model that simulates how a disease spreads through a population as its members change from susceptible to infected to recovered and then back to susceptible. The dynamics of the model are such that there are multiple emergent outcomes depending on the parameter settings, initial conditions, and chance.

The curricular model can be used with the chapter Agent-Based Modeling in Mixed Methods Research (Moritz et al. 2022) in the Handbook of Teaching Qualitative & Mixed Methods (Ruth et al. 2022).

The instructional videos can be accessed on YouTube: Video 1 (https://youtu.be/32_JIfBodWs); Video 2 (https://youtu.be/0PK_zVKNcp8); and Video 3 (https://youtu.be/0bT0_mYSAJ8).

This model is intended to study the way information is collectively managed (i.e. shared, collected, processed, and stored) in a system and how it performs during a crisis or disaster. Performance is assessed in terms of the system’s ability to provide the information needed to the actors who need it when they need it. There are two main types of actors in the simulation, namely communities and professional responders. Their ability to exchange information is crucial to improve the system’s performance as each of them has direct access to only part of the information they need.

In a nutshell, the following occurs during a simulation. Due to a disaster, a series of randomly occurring disruptive events takes place. The actors in the simulation need to keep track of such events. Specifically, each event generates information needs for the different actors, which increases the information gaps (i.e. the “piles” of unaddressed information needs). In order to reduce the information gaps, the actors need to “discover” the pieces of information they need. The desired behavior or performance of the system is to keep the information gaps as low as possible, which is to address as many information needs as possible as they occur.

Reconstruction of the original code M. Cohen, J. March, and J. Olsen garbage can model, realized by means of Microsoft Office Excel 2010

Party Competition with Costly Voting builds upon the baseline model in Chapter 5 from Laver and Sergenti’s Party Competition (2011); it adds voting costs to generate variable turnout.

This model describes and analyses the outcomes of the confrontation of interests, some conflicting, some common, about the management of a small river in SW France

NetLogo model that allows scenarios concerning general social distancing, shielding of high-risk individuals, and informing contacts when symptomatic. Documentation includes a user manual with some simple scenarios, and technical information including descriptions of key procedures and parameter values.

The Episim framework builds upon the established transportation simulation MATSim and is capable of tracking agents’ movements within a network and thus computing infection chains. Several characteristics of the virus and the environment can be parametred, whilst the infection dynamics is computed based upon a compartment model. The spread of the virus can be mitigated by restricting the agents’ activity in certain places.

STiMUS-HAI (Stigmergic–Mutualistic IMOI Model, Human-AI extension) is an agent-based model of teamwork in socio-technical systems where human and AI contributors collaborate through shared digital artefacts — wiki pages, code files, issue tickets, project cards, Scratch projects — represented as patches in a NetLogo world. It extends the human-only base model STiMUS v2.2, which established that two coordination mechanisms — stigmergy (indirect coordination through traces left in the environment) and mutualism (mutual benefit between contributors and the artefacts they tend) — can be decoupled: stigmergy decides where a contributor works, mutualism decides with what effort. STiMUS-HAI preserves this decoupling unchanged and adds two further theoretical questions: whether mixing AI agents into a human team distorts human coordination in ways that aggregate indicators hide, and whether AI’s cost to team outcomes depends on the type of work AI performs, not only on how much of it is present.

Two breeds of turtle — humans and ai-agents — follow identical target-selection, pheromone, and mutualism rules, so that any behavioural difference is attributable to team composition rather than a built-in advantage. The one designed asymmetry: AI agents never accumulate shared-mental-model and their motivation is fixed rather than adaptive. On top of this v3.0 baseline, v3.1 adds a task-type dimension to artefacts (“prediction” versus “judgment”, set via a judgment-share slider) that scales down AI edit-power specifically on judgment-requiring artefacts, and an ai-trust mechanic: humans build or lose trust in AI contributions based on the population-relative percentile rank of observed AI work quality (bottom-quartile work counts as an observed “error”), and that trust gates how much mutualistic benefit a human derives from continuing an AI’s work. Trust erodes quickly on a single error and recovers only after a streak of confirmed successes — an intentional asymmetry.

This model aims at creating agent populations that have “personalities”, as described by the Big Five Model of Personality. The expression of the Big Five in the agent population has the following properties, so that they resemble real life populations as closely as possible:
-The population mean of each trait is 0.5 on a scale from 0 to 1.
-The population-wide distribution of each trait approximates a normal distribution.
-The intercorrelations of the Big Five are close to those observed in the Literature.

The literature used to fit the model was a publication by Dimitri van der Linden, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Arnold B. Bakker:
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The three-day participatory workshop organized by the TISSS Lab had 20 participants who were academics in different career stages ranging from university student to professor. For each of the five games, the participants had to move between tables according to some pre-specified rules. After the workshop both the participant’s perception of the games’ complexities and the participants’ satisfaction with the games were recorded.

In order to obtain additional objective measures for the games’ complexities, these games were also simulated using this simulation model here. Therefore, the simulation model is an as-accurate-as-possible reproduction of the workshop games: it has 20 participants moving between 5 different tables. The rules that specify who moves when vary from game to game. Just to get an idea, Game 3 has the rule: “move if you’re sitting next to someone who is waring white or no socks”.

An exact description of the workshop games and the associated simulation models can be found in the paper “The relation between perceived complexity and happiness with decision situations: searching for objective measures in social simulation games”.