Computational Model Library

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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.

The aim of this model is to study the dynamic propagation of individual climate adaptive behaviours in different scenarios within the analytical framework of conservation motivation theory, focusing on the impact of social and experiential learning on the adoption of climate adaptive behaviours by coastal farmers.
Model for paper “Promoting climate resilience through learning-based behavioural change: Insights from an agent-based model of a coastal farming community in Guangxi, China” in Environmental Science & Policy, Volume 179, May 2026, 104375, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2026.104375

Negotiation Lab 1.0

Julián Arévalo | Published Friday, March 20, 2026

Negotiation Lab 1.0 is an agent-based model of peace negotiations that explores how the parties’ readiness — their motivation and optimism to engage in talks — evolves dynamically throughout the negotiation process. The model reconceptualizes readiness as an adaptive state variable that is continuously updated through feedback from negotiation outcomes, rather than a static precondition assessed at the onset of talks.
The model simulates two parties negotiating a multi-issue agenda. In each round, parties allocate effort to the current sub-issue; outcomes depend on their joint effort and a stochastic component representing external factors. Results feed back into each party’s readiness, shaping subsequent engagement. The negotiation ends either when all agenda items are resolved (agreement) or when a party’s readiness falls below a critical threshold (breakdown).
Key parameters include the initial readiness of each party, agenda structure (balanced, hard, easy, red, or random), type of negotiation (from highly cooperative to highly competitive), and each party’s effort strategy (always high, always low, random, or pseudo tit-for-tat). The model shows that while initial readiness is associated with negotiation outcomes, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to determine them: process variables — the type of interaction, agenda design, and adaptive effort strategies — exert comparatively larger effects on outcomes. Identical initial conditions can produce widely divergent trajectories, illustrating path dependence and sensitivity to feedback dynamics.
The model is implemented in NetLogo 7.0 and is documented using the ODD+D protocol. It is associated with the paper “Beyond Initial Conditions: How Adaptive Readiness Shapes Peace Negotiation Outcomes” (Arévalo, under review).

FRAMe (Flood Resilience Agent-Based Model)

Wenhan Feng | Published Wednesday, October 22, 2025

The FRAMe (Flood Resilience Agent-Based Model) serves as a framework designed to simulate flood resilience dynamics at the community level, focusing on a rural settlement in the Mekong River Basin. Integrating empirical data from extensive surveys, Bayesian networks, and hydrological simulations, the framework quantifies resilience as a trade-off between robustness (resistance to damage) and adaptability (capacity for dynamic response). Agents include households, governments, and other actors, linked by social and governance networks that facilitate knowledge transfer, resource distribution, and risk communication. FRAMe incorporates mechanisms for flood forecasting, policy interventions (education, aid, insurance), and individual and collective decision-making, grounded in Protection Motivation Theory and MoHuB frameworks. The framework’s spatially explicit design leverages GIS data, which supports scenario testing of governance structures and stakeholder interactions. By examining policy scenarios and agent behavior, FRAMe aims to inform adaptive flood management strategies and enhance community resilience.

The wisdom of the crowd refers to the phenomenon in which a group of individuals, each making independent decisions, can collectively arrive at highly accurate solutions—often more accurate than any individual within the group. This principle relies heavily on independence: if individual opinions are unbiased and uncorrelated, their errors tend to cancel out when averaged, reducing overall bias. However, in real-world social networks, individuals are often influenced by their neighbors, introducing correlations between decisions. Such social influence can amplify biases, disrupting the benefits of independent voting. This trade-off between independence and interdependence has striking parallels to ensemble learning methods in machine learning. Bagging (bootstrap aggregating) improves classification performance by combining independently trained weak learners, reducing bias. Boosting, on the other hand, explicitly introduces sequential dependence among learners, where each learner focuses on correcting the errors of its predecessors. This process can reinforce biases present in the data even if it reduces variance. Here, we introduce a new meta-algorithm, casting, which captures this biological and computational trade-off. Casting forms partially connected groups (“castes”) of weak learners that are internally linked through boosting, while the castes themselves remain independent and are aggregated using bagging. This creates a continuum between full independence (i.e., bagging) and full dependence (i.e., boosting). This method allows for the testing of model capabilities across values of the hyperparameter which controls connectedness. We specifically investigate classification tasks, but the method can be used for regression tasks as well. Ultimately, casting can provide insights for how real systems contend with classification problems.

Urban Teacher Lifecycle and Mobility

Yevgeny Patarakin | Published Wednesday, July 23, 2025

This agent-based model simulates the lifecycle, movement, and satisfaction of teachers within an urban educational system composed of multiple universities and schools. Each teacher agent transitions through several possible roles: newcomer, university student, unemployed graduate, and employed teacher. Teachers’ pathways are shaped by spatial configuration, institutional capacities, individual characteristics, and dynamic interactions with schools and universities. Universities are assigned spatial locations with a controllable level of centralization and are characterized by academic ratings, capacity, and alumni records. Schools are distributed throughout the city, each with a limited number of vacancies, hiring requirements, and offered salaries. Teachers apply to universities based on the alignment of their personal academic profiles with institutional ratings, pursue studies, and upon graduation become candidates for employment at schools.
The employment process is driven by a decentralized matching of teacher expectations and school offers, taking into account factors such as salary, proximity, and peer similarity. Teachers’ satisfaction evolves over time, reflecting both institutional characteristics and the composition of their colleagues; low satisfaction may prompt teachers to transfer between schools within their mobility radius. Mortality and teacher attrition further shape workforce dynamics, leading to continuous recruitment of newcomers to maintain a stable population. The model tracks university reputation through the academic performance and number of alumni, and visualizes key metrics including teacher status distribution, school staffing, university alumni counts, and overall satisfaction. This structure enables the exploration of policy interventions, hiring and training strategies, and the impact of spatial and institutional design on the allocation, retention, and happiness of urban educational staff.

Sahelian transhumance is a type of socio-economic and environmental pastoral mobility. It involves the movement of herds from their terroir of origin (i.e., their original pastures) to one or more host terroirs, followed by a return to the terroir of origin.  According to certain pastoralists, the mobility of herds is planned to prevent environmental degradation, given the continuous dependence of these herds on their environment. However, these herds emit Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the spaces they traverse. Given that GHGs contribute to global warming, our long-term objective is to quantify the GHGs emitted by Sahelian herds. The determination of these herds’ GHG emissions requires: (1) the artificial replication of the transhumance, and (2) precise knowledge of the space used during their transhumance.
This article presents the design of an artificial replication of the transhumance through an agent-based model named MSTRANS. MSTRANS determines the space used by transhumant herds, based on the decision-making process of Sahelian transhumants.
MSTRANS integrates a constrained multi-objective optimization problem and algorithms into an agent-based model. The constrained multi-objective optimization problem encapsulates the rationality and adaptability of pastoral strategies. Interactions between a transhumant and its socio-economic network are modeled using algorithms, diffusion processes, and within the multi-objective optimization problem. The dynamics of pastoral resources are formalized at various spatio-temporal scales using equations that are integrated into the algorithms.
The results of MSTRANS are validated using GPS data collected from transhumant herds in Senegal. MSTRANS results highlight the relevance of integrated models and constrained multi-objective optimization for modeling and monitoring the movements of transhumant herds in the Sahel. Now specialists in calculating greenhouse gas emissions have a reproducible and reusable tool for determining the space occupied by transhumant herds in a Sahelian country. In addition, decision-makers, pastoralists, veterinarians and traders have a reproducible and reusable tool to help them make environmental and socio-economic decisions.

Our aim is to demonstrate how conversational AI systems, exemplified by ChatGPT, can support the conceptualisation of Agent-Based Social Simulation (ABSS) models, leading to a full ABSS model design document. Through advanced prompt engineering and adherence to the Engineering ABSS framework (Siebers and Klügl 2017), we have constructed a comprehensive script that is easy to use and that supports the design of ABSS models with or even by AI. The performance of the script is demonstrated through an illustrative case study related to the use of adaptive architecture in museums. The repository contains (1) the comprehensive script in a format that allows copying and pasting prompts for use with ChatGPT, (2) the results of the illustrative case study in the form of two conceptual ABSS models, the ground truth and the autogenerated version.

Peer reviewed A financial market with zero intelligence agents

edgarkp | Published Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The model’s aim is to represent the price dynamics under very simple market conditions, given the values adopted by the user for the model parameters. We suppose the market of a financial asset contains agents on the hypothesis they have zero-intelligence. In each period, a certain amount of agents are randomly selected to participate to the market. Each of these agents decides, in a equiprobable way, between proposing to make a transaction (talk = 1) or not (talk = 0). Again in an equiprobable way, each participating agent decides to speak on the supply (ask) or the demand side (bid) of the market, and proposes a volume of assets, where this number is drawn randomly from a uniform distribution. The granularity depends on various factors, including market conventions, the type of assets or goods being traded, and regulatory requirements. In some markets, high granularity is essential to capture small price movements accurately, while in others, coarser granularity is sufficient due to the nature of the assets or goods being traded

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.

Displaying 10 of 65 results adaptive clear search

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