Load shedding enjoys increasing popularity as a way to reduce power consumption in buildings during hours of peak demand on the electricity grid. This practice has well known cost saving and reliability benefits for the grid, and the contracts utilities sign with their “interruptible” customers often pass on substantial electricity cost savings to participants. Less well-studied are the impacts of load shedding on building occupants, hence this study investigates those impacts on occupant comfort and adaptive behaviors. It documents experience in two office buildings located near Philadelphia (USA) that vary in terms of controllability and the set of adaptive actions available to occupants. An agent-based model (ABM) framework generalizes the case-study insights in a “what-if” format to support operational decision making by building managers and tenants. The framework, implemented in EnergyPlus and NetLogo, simulates occupants that have heterogeneous
thermal and lighting preferences. The simulated occupants pursue local adaptive actions such as adjusting clothing or using portable fans when central building controls are not responsive, and experience organizational constraints, including a corporate dress code and miscommunication with building managers. The model predicts occupant decisions to act fairly well but has limited ability to predict which specific adaptive actions occupants will select.

We construct a new type of agent-based model (ABM) that can simultaneously simulate land-use changes at multiple distant places (namely TeleABM, telecoupled agent-based model). We use soybean trade between Brazil and China as an example, where Brazil is the sending system and China is the receiving system because they are the world’s largest soybean exporter and importer respectively. We select one representative county in each country to calibrate and validate the model with spatio-temporal analysis of historical land-use changes and the empirical analysis of household survey data. The whole model is programmed on RePast Simphony. The most unique features of TeleABM are that it can simulate a telecoupled system and the flows between sending and receiving systems in this telecoupled system.

InformalCity, a spatially explicit agent-based model, simulates an artificial city and allows for testing configurations of urban upgrading schemes in informal settlements.

Exploring how learning and social-ecological networks influence management choice set and their ability to increase the likelihood of species coexistence (i.e. biodiversity) on a fragmented landscape controlled by different managers.

FNNR-ABM is an agent-based model that simulates human activity, Guizhou snub-nosed monkey movement, and GTGP-enrolled land parcel conversion in the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve in Guizhou, China.

Quick-start guide:
1. Install Python and set environmental path variables.
2. Install the mesa, matplotlib (optional), and pyshp (optional) Python libraries.
3. Configure fnnr_config_file.py.
…

There is a new type of economic model called a capital exchange model, in which the biophysical economy is abstracted away, and the interaction of units of money is studied. Benatti, Drăgulescu and Yakovenko described at least eight capital exchange models – now referred to collectively as the BDY models – which are replicated as models A through H in EiLab. In recent writings, Yakovenko goes on to show that the entropy of these monetarily isolated systems rises to a maximal possible value as the model approaches steady state, and remains there, in analogy of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. EiLab demonstrates this behaviour. However, it must be noted that we are NOT talking about thermodynamic entropy. Heat is not being modeled – only simple exchanges of cash. But the same statistical formulae apply.

In three unpublished papers and a collection of diary notes and conference presentations (all available with this model), the concept of “entropic index” is defined for use in agent-based models (ABMs), with a particular interest in sustainable economics. Models I and J of EiLab are variations of the BDY model especially designed to study the Maximum Entropy Principle (MEP – model I) and the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP – model J) in ABMs. Both the MEPP and H.T. Odum’s Maximum Power Principle (MPP) have been proposed as organizing principles for complex adaptive systems. The MEPP and the MPP are two sides of the same coin, and an understanding of their implications is key, I believe, to understanding economic sustainability. Both of these proposed (and not widely accepted) principles describe the role of entropy in non-isolated systems in which complexity is generated and flourishes, such as ecosystems, and economies.

EiLab is one of several models exploring the dynamics of sustainable economics – PSoup, ModEco, EiLab, OamLab, MppLab, TpLab, and CmLab.

EiLab explores the role of entropy in simple economic models. EiLab is one of several models exploring the dynamics of sustainable economics – PSoup, ModEco, EiLab, OamLab, MppLab, TpLab, and CmLab.

The command and control policy in natural resource management, including water resources, is a longstanding established policy that has been theoretically and practically argued from the point of view of social-ecological complex systems. With the intention of making a system ecologically resilient, these days, policymakers apply the top-down policies of controlling communities through regulations. To explore how these policies may work and to understand whether the ecological goal can be achieved via command and control policy, this research uses the capacity of Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as an experimental platform in the Urmia Lake Basin (ULB) in Iran, which is a social-ecological complex system and has gone through a drought process.

Despite the uncertainty of the restorability capacity of the lake, there has been a consensus on the possibility to artificially restore the lake through the nationally managed Urmia Lake Restoratoin Program (ULRP). To reduce water consumption in the Basin, the ULRP widely targets the agricultural sector and proposes the project of changing crop patterns from high-water-demand (HWD) to low-water-demand (LWD), which includes a component to control water consumption by establishing water-police forces.

Using a wide range of multidisciplinary studies about Urmia Lake at the Basin and sub-basins as well as qualitative information at micro-level as the main conceptual sources for the ABM, the findings under different strategies indicate that targeting crop patterns change by legally limiting farmers’ access to water could force farmers to change their crop patterns for a short period of time as long as the number of police constantly increases. However, it is not a sustainable policy for either changing the crop patterns nor restoring the lake.

The model is an agent-based artificial stock market where investors connect in a dynamic network. The network is dynamic in the sense that the investors, at specified intervals, decide whether to keep their current adviser (those investors they receive trading advise from). The investors also gain information from a private source and share public information about the risky asset. Investors have different tendencies to follow the different information sources, consider differing amounts of history, and have different thresholds for investing.

The model aims at estimating household energy consumption and the related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction based on the behavior of the individual household under different operationalizations of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB).
The original model is developed as a tool to explore households decisions regarding solar panel investments and cumulative consequences of these individual choices (i.e. diffusion of PVs, regional emissions savings, monetary savings). We extend the model to explore a methodological question regarding an interpretation of qualitative concepts from social science theories, specifically Theory of Planned Behaviour in a formal code of quantitative agent-based models (ABMs). We develop 3 versions of the model: one TPB-based ABM designed by the authors and two alternatives inspired by the TPB-ABM of Schwarz and Ernst (2009) and the TPB-ABM of Rai and Robinson (2015). The model is implemented in NetLogo.