The rapid environmental changes currently underway in many dry regions of the world, and the deep uncertainty about their consequences, underscore a critical challenge for sustainability: how to maintain cooperation that ensures the provision of natural resources when the benefits of cooperating are variable, sometimes uncertain, and often limited. We present an agent-based model that simulates the economic decisions of households to engage, or not, in labor-sharing agreements under different scenarios of water supply, water variability, and socio-environmental risk. We formulate the model to investigate the consequences of environmental variability on the fate of labor-sharing agreements between farmers. The economic decisions were implemented in the framework of prospect theory.

Agers and non-agers agent compete over a spatial landscape. When two agents occupy the same grid, who will survive is decided by a random draw where chances of survival are proportional to fitness. Agents have offspring each time step who are born at a distance b from the parent agent and the offpring inherits their genetic fitness plus a random term. Genetic fitness decreases with time, representing environmental change but effective non-inheritable fitness can increase as animals learn and get bigger.

STiMUS (Stigmergic–Mutualistic IMOI Model) is an agent-based model of teamwork in socio-technical systems where contributors collaborate through shared digital artefacts — wiki pages, code files, issue tickets, project cards, Scratch projects — represented as patches in a NetLogo world. The model integrates two coordination mechanisms. Stigmergy is indirect coordination through traces left in a shared environment: each edit deposits a pheromone that diffuses to neighbouring patches and evaporates over time, so recent activity attracts further contributions. Mutualism is a reciprocal benefit loop in which valuable, well-maintained artefacts raise contributor motivation and shared understanding, while motivated contributors improve artefacts.

Contributors (turtles of the contributor breed) carry individual state: skill, motivation, shared-mental-model, specialty, benefit-gain, and an explicit-mode flag. At each tick every contributor selects a target artefact with an ant-colony-optimization-style rule weighing the artefact’s pheromone, incompleteness (1 - completeness), resource-value, and topic match between specialty and the artefact’s topic-tag; with probability p-explicit it instead takes the patch with the highest maintenance-need, modelling explicit task assignment. Each edit increases pheromone, quality, completeness and reuse-count, raises resource-value, lowers maintenance-need, and appends the editor to the artefact’s edit-authors list. When the previous last-editor-id differs from the current editor, the Edit Succession Ratio rises, the editor’s shared-mental-model grows, and a co-editing link is created — operationalising the idea that repeated cross-author succession on the same artefact builds shared understanding. Contributors’ motivation is updated from the benefit drawn from the visited artefact.

Each patch maintains a stigmergic layer (pheromone, quality, completeness, recentness, last-editor-id, edit-count, edit-authors) and a mutualistic layer (resource-value, reuse-count, maintenance-need, topic-tag), plus task flags (is-task?, task-complexity). Global monitors report the Edit Succession Ratio (ESR = cross-author-edits / total-edits, and an alternative esr-value = share of edited patches with more than one distinct author), mean-quality, mean-resource-value, a mutualism-index averaging contributor benefit and resource value, coediting-density (network density of the co-editing graph), active-pages-share, and task-completion-rate. The model logs every edit as a bipartite edge (tick, author_id, pageid, specialty, topic_tag, quality), exportable to CSV.

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Status-power dynamics on a playground, resulting in a status landscape with a gender status gap. Causal: individual (beauty, kindness, power), binary (rough-and-tumble; has-been-nice) or prior popularity (status). Cultural: acceptability of fighting.

The network-based trust game is a hybridization of both the repeated trust games and the network games.

ViSA simulates the decision behaviors of different stakeholders showing demands for ecosystem services (ESS) in agricultural landscape. The lack of sufficient supply of ESSs triggers stakeholders to apply different management options to increase their supply. However, while attempting to reduce the supply-demand gap, conflicts arise among stakeholders due to the tradeoff nature of some ESS. ViSA investigates conditions and scenarios that can minimize such supply-demand gap while reducing the risk of conflicts by suggesting different mixes of management options and decision rules.

In this simulation, we modify the norms game model to bid-rigging (collusion) model, while we can simulate also the norms game model.

This model was developed to test the usability of evolutionary computing and reinforcement learning by extending a well known agent-based model. Sugarscape (Epstein & Axtell, 1996) has been used to demonstrate migration, trade, wealth inequality, disease processes, sex, culture, and conflict. It is on conflict that this model is focused to demonstrate how machine learning methodologies could be applied.

The code is based on the Sugarscape 2 Constant Growback model, availble in the NetLogo models library. New code was added into the existing model while removing code that was not needed and modifying existing code to support the changes. Support for the original movement rule was retained while evolutionary computing, Q-Learning, and SARSA Learning were added.

The model represents a set of social actors engaged into a collegiate (composed of representants of civil society and public sector) to manage the Southern Rural Territory of Sergipe (SRTS), created by two territorial public policies, the National Program for the Sustainable Development of Rural Territories (PRONAT) and the Program Territories of Citizenship (PTC) which aim at balancing power relations between social actors of Rural Territories. The main gola of these public policies is to empower the civil society engaged in the territory to enable them to negotiate with the traditional power (mainly majors). It was designed two models of the SRTS, one that represents the situation in 2012, and other that represents the social interdependencies in 2017. For each period it is possible to measure the capability and power of each modeled social actor and see whether it is observed the empowerment of the civil society or not.

The model proposes a translation of some Luhmann’s concepts (social sub-system, perturbation, dissipation, social communication and power) into a model using a stylized spatial-society as a metaphor of a Luhmann’s social subsystem. The model has been used to improve the social theory understanding and to evaluate the effect of different parameterization in the global stabilization and individual/social power distribution.