The fight against poverty is an urgent global challenge. Microinsurance is promoted as a valuable instrument for buffering income losses due to health or climate-related risks of low-income households in developing countries. However, apart from direct positive effects they can have unintended side effects when insured households lower their contribution to traditional arrangements where risk is shared through private monetary support.

RiskNetABM is an agent-based model that captures dynamics between income losses, insurance payments and informal risk-sharing. The model explicitly includes decisions about informal transfers. It can be used to assess the impact of insurance products and informal risk-sharing arrangements on the resilience of smallholders. Specifically, it allows to analyze whether and how economic needs (i.e. level of living costs) and characteristics of extreme events (i.e. frequency, intensity and type of shock) influence the ability of insurance and informal risk-sharing to buffer income shocks. Two types of behavior with regard to private monetary transfers are explicitly distinguished: (1) all households provide transfers whenever they can afford it and (2) insured households do not show solidarity with their uninsured peers.

The model is stylized and is not used to analyze a particular case study, but represents conditions from several regions with different risk contexts where informal risk-sharing networks between smallholder farmers are prevalent.

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Many archaeological assemblages from the Iberian Peninsula dated to the Last Glacial Maximum contain large quantities of European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) remains with an anthropic origin. Ethnographic and historic studies report that rabbits may be mass-collected through warren-based harvesting involving the collaborative participation of several persons.

We propose and implement an Agent-Based Model grounded in the Optimal Foraging Theory and the Diet Breadth Model to examine how different warren-based hunting strategies influence the resulting human diets.

Particularly, this model is developed to test the following hypothesis: What if an age and/or gender-based division of labor was adopted, in which adult men focus on large prey hunting, and women, elders and children exploit warrens?

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The purpose of this model is to explore the influence of integrating individuals’ behavioral dynamics in an agent-based model of COVID-19, on the dynamics of disease transmission. The model is an agent-based extention of an established large-scale Individual-based model called STRIDE. Four risk factors determine the individual’s perception of the risk and how they behave accordingly. It is assumed that individuals with higher levels of risk perception adopt higher levels of contact reduction in their daily routines. Individuals can assign different weights to any of the four different risk factors, i.e., the modeler can model different populations and explore how the transmission dynamics vary among them.

Consumer agents make choices which products to choose using the consumat approach. In this approach agents will make choices using deliberation, repetition, imitation or social comparison dependent on the level of need satisfaction and uncertainty.
The model is discussed in Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling by Marco Janssen. For more information see https://intro2abm.com/

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.

ThomondSim is a simulation of the political and economic landscape of the medieval kingdom of Thomond, southwestern Ireland, between 1276 and 1318.

Its goal is to analyze how deteriorating environmental and economic conditions caused by the Little Ice Age (LIA), the Great European Famine of 1315-1322, and wars between England and Scotland affected the outcomes of a local war involving Gaelic and English aristocratic lineages.
This ABM attempts to model both the effects of devastation on the human environment and the modus operandi of late-medieval war and diplomacy.

The model is the digital counterpart of the science discovery board game The Triumphs of Turlough. Its procedures closely correspond to the game’s mechanics, to the point that ToT can be considered an interactive, analog version of this ABM.

The first simple movement models used unbiased and uncorrelated random walks (RW). In such models of movement, the direction of the movement is totally independent of the previous movement direction. In other words, at each time step the direction, in which an individual is moving is completely random. This process is referred to as a Brownian motion.
On the other hand, in correlated random walks (CRW) the choice of the movement directions depends on the direction of the previous movement. At each time step, the movement direction has a tendency to point in the same direction as the previous one. This movement model fits well observational movement data for many animal species.

The presented agent based model simulated the movement of the agents as a correlated random walk (CRW). The turning angle at each time step follows the Von Mises distribution with a ϰ of 10. The closer ϰ gets to zero, the closer the Von Mises distribution becomes uniform. The larger ϰ gets, the more the Von Mises distribution approaches a normal distribution concentrated around the mean (0°).
In this script the turning angles (following the Von Mises distribution) are generated based on the the instructions from N. I. Fisher 2011.
This model is implemented in Javascript and can be used as a building block for more complex agent based models that would rely on describing the movement of individuals with CRW.

Confirmation Bias is usually seen as a flaw of the human mind. However, in some tasks, it may also increase performance. Here, agents are confronted with a number of binary Signals (A, or B). They have a base detection rate, e.g. 50%, and after they detected one signal, they get biased towards this type of signal. This means, that they observe that kind of signal a bit better, and the other signal a bit worse. This is moderated by a variable called “bias_effect”, e.g. 10%. So an agent who detects A first, gets biased towards A and then improves its chance to detect A-signals by 10%. Thus, this agent detects A-Signals with the probability of 50%+10% = 60% and detects B-Signals with the probability of 50%-10% = 40%.
Given such a framework, agents that have the ability to be biased have better results in most of the scenarios.

The model constructs a complex network of traffic based on the main urban area of Zhengzhou, China, and simulates the urban rainfall process using the ABM model to analyse the real-time risk of flooding hazards in the nodes of the complex network.

We present a socio-epistemic model of science inspired by the existing literature on opinion dynamics. In this model, we embed the agents (or scientists) into social networks - e.g., we link those who work in the same institutions. And we place them into a regular lattice - each representing a unique mental model. Thus, the global environment describes networks of concepts connected based on their similarity. For instance, we may interpret the neighbor lattices as two equivalent models, except one does not include a causal path between two variables.

Agents interact with one another and move across the epistemic lattices. In other words, we allow the agents to explore or travel across the mental models. However, we constrain their movements based on absorptive capacity and cognitive coherence. Namely, in each round, an agent picks a focal point - e.g., one of their colleagues - and will move towards it. But the agents’ ability to move and speed depends on how far apart they are from the focal point - and if their new position is cognitive/logic consistent.

Therefore, we propose an analytical model that examines the connection between agents’ accumulated knowledge, social learning, and the span of attitudes towards mental models in an artificial society. While we rely on the example from the General Theory of Relativity renaissance, our goal is to observe what determines the creation and diffusion of mental models. We offer quantitative and inductive research, which collects data from an artificial environment to elaborate generalized theories about the evolution of science.