Our mission is to help computational modelers at all levels engage in the establishment and adoption of community standards and good practices for developing and sharing computational models. Model authors can freely publish their model source code in the Computational Model Library alongside narrative documentation, open science metadata, and other emerging open science norms that facilitate software citation, reproducibility, interoperability, and reuse. Model authors can also request peer review of their computational models to receive a DOI.
All users of models published in the library must cite model authors when they use and benefit from their code.
Please check out our model publishing tutorial and contact us if you have any questions or concerns about publishing your model(s) in the Computational Model Library.
We also maintain a curated database of over 7500 publications of agent-based and individual based models with additional detailed metadata on availability of code and bibliometric information on the landscape of ABM/IBM publications that we welcome you to explore.
Displaying 10 of 138 results human clear search
This project is an interactive agent-based model simulating consumption of a shared, renewable resource using a game-theoretic framework with environmental feedback. The primary function of this model was to test how resource-use among AI and human agents degrades the environment, and to explore the socio-environmental feedback loops that lead to complex emergent system dynamics. We implemented a classic game theoretic matrix which decides agents´ strategies, and added a feedback loop which switches between strategies in pristine vs degraded environments. This leads to cooperation in bad environments, and defection in good ones.
Despite this use, it can be applicable for a variety of other scenarios including simulating climate disasters, environmental sensitivity to resource consumption, or influence of environmental degradation to agent behaviour.
The ABM was inspired by the Weitz et. al. (2016, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27830651/) use of environmental feedback in their paper, as well as the Demographic Prisoner’s Dilemma on a Grid model (https://mesa.readthedocs.io/stable/examples/advanced/pd_grid.html#demographic-prisoner-s-dilemma-on-a-grid). The main innovation is the added environmental feedback with local resource replenishment.
Beyond its theoretical insights into coevolutionary dynamics, it serves as a versatile tool with several practical applications. For urban planners and policymakers, the model can function as a ”digital sandbox” for testing the impacts of locating high-consumption industrial agents, such as data centers, in proximity to residential communities. It allows for the exploration of different urban densities, and the evaluation of policy interventions—such as taxes on defection or subsidies for cooperation—by directly modifying the agents’ resource consumptions to observe effects on resource health. Furthermore, the model provides a framework for assessing the resilience of such socio-environmental systems to external shocks.
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The model represents urban commuters’ transport mode choices among cars, public transit, and motorcycles—a mode highly prevalent in developing countries. Using an agent-based modeling approach, it simulates transport dynamics and serves as a testbed for evaluating policies aimed at improving mobility.
The model simulates an ecosystem of human agents who decide, at each time step, which mode of transportation to use for commuting to work. Their decision is based on a combination of personal satisfaction with their most recent journey—evaluated across a vector of individual needs—the information they crowdsource from their social network, and their personal uncertainty regarding trying new transport options.
Agents are assigned demographic attributes such as sex, age, and income level, and are distributed across city neighborhoods according to their socioeconomic status. To represent social influence in decision-making, agents are connected via a scale-free social network topology, where connections are more likely among agents within the same socioeconomic group, reflecting the tendency of individuals to form social ties with similar others.
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The emergence of cooperation in human societies is often linked to environmental constraints, yet the specific conditions that promote cooperative behavior remain an open question. This study examines how resource unpredictability and spatial dispersion influence the evolution of cooperation using an agent-based model (ABM). Our simulations test the effects of rainfall variability and resource distribution on the survival of cooperative and non-cooperative strategies. The results show that cooperation is most likely to emerge when resources are patchy, widely spaced, and rainfall is unpredictable. In these environments, non-cooperators rapidly deplete local resources and face high mortality when forced to migrate between distant patches. In contrast, cooperators—who store and share resources—can better endure extended droughts and irregular resource availability. While rainfall stochasticity alone does not directly select for cooperation, its interaction with resource patchiness and spatial constraints creates conditions where cooperative strategies provide a survival advantage. These findings offer broader insights into how environmental uncertainty shapes social organization in resource-limited settings. By integrating ecological constraints into computational modeling, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the conditions that drive cooperation across diverse human and animal systems.
We provide a theory-grounded, socio-geographic agent-based model to present a possible explanation for human movement in the Adriatic region within the Cetina phenomenon.
Focusing on ideas of social capital theory from Piere Bordieu (1986), we implement agent mobility in an abstract geography based on cultural capital (prestige) and social capital (social position). Agents hold myopic representations of social (Schaff, 2016) and geographical networks and decide in a heuristic way on moving (and where) or staying.
The model is implemented in a fork of the Laboratory for Simulation Development (LSD), appended with GIS capabilities (Pereira et. al. 2020).
This agent-based model explores the dynamics between human behavior and vaccination strategies during COVID-19 pandemics. It examines how individual risk perceptions influence behaviors and subsequently affect epidemic outcomes in a simulated metropolitan area resembling New York City from December 2020 to May 2021.
Agents modify their daily activities—deciding whether to travel to densely populated urban centers or stay in less crowded neighborhoods—based on their risk perception. This perception is influenced by factors such as risk perception threshold, risk tolerance personality, mortality rate, disease prevalence, and the average number of contacts per agent in crowded settings. Agent characteristics are carefully calibrated to reflect New York City demographics, including age distribution and variations in infection probability and mortality rates across these groups. The agents can experience six distinct health statuses: susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered from infection, dead, and vaccinated (SEIRDV). The simulation focuses on the Iota and Alpha variants, the dominant strains in New York City during the period.
We simulate six scenarios divided into three main categories:
1. A baseline model without vaccinations where agents exhibit no risk perception and are indifferent to virus transmission and disease prevalence.
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AgModel is an agent-based model of the forager-farmer transition. The model consists of a single software agent that, conceptually, can be thought of as a single hunter-gather community (i.e., a co-residential group that shares in subsistence activities and decision making). The agent has several characteristics, including a population of human foragers, intrinsic birth and death rates, an annual total energy need, and an available amount of foraging labor. The model assumes a central-place foraging strategy in a fixed territory for a two-resource economy: cereal grains and prey animals. The territory has a fixed number of patches, and a starting number of prey. While the model is not spatially explicit, it does assume some spatiality of resources by including search times.
Demographic and environmental components of the simulation occur and are updated at an annual temporal resolution, but foraging decisions are “event” based so that many such decisions will be made in each year. Thus, each new year, the foraging agent must undertake a series of optimal foraging decisions based on its current knowledge of the availability of cereals and prey animals. Other resources are not accounted for in the model directly, but can be assumed for by adjusting the total number of required annual energy intake that the foraging agent uses to calculate its cereal and prey animal foraging decisions. The agent proceeds to balance the net benefits of the chance of finding, processing, and consuming a prey animal, versus that of finding a cereal patch, and processing and consuming that cereal. These decisions continue until the annual kcal target is reached (balanced on the current human population). If the agent consumes all available resources in a given year, it may “starve”. Starvation will affect birth and death rates, as will foraging success, and so the population will increase or decrease according to a probabilistic function (perturbed by some stochasticity) and the agent’s foraging success or failure. The agent is also constrained by labor caps, set by the modeler at model initialization. If the agent expends its yearly budget of person-hours for hunting or foraging, then the agent can no longer do those activities that year, and it may starve.
Foragers choose to either expend their annual labor budget either hunting prey animals or harvesting cereal patches. If the agent chooses to harvest prey animals, they will expend energy searching for and processing prey animals. prey animals search times are density dependent, and the number of prey animals per encounter and handling times can be altered in the model parameterization (e.g. to increase the payoff per encounter). Prey animal populations are also subject to intrinsic birth and death rates with the addition of additional deaths caused by human predation. A small amount of prey animals may “migrate” into the territory each year. This prevents prey animals populations from complete decimation, but also may be used to model increased distances of logistic mobility (or, perhaps, even residential mobility within a larger territory).
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The HUMan Impact on LANDscapes (HUMLAND) 2.0.0 is an enhanced version of HUMLAND 1.0.0, developed to track and quantify the intensity of various impacts on landscapes at a continental scale. The model is designed to identify the most influential factors in the transformation of interglacial vegetation, with a particular focus on the burning practices of hunter-gatherers. HUMLAND 2.0.0 incorporates a wide range of spatial datasets as both inputs and targets (expected modelling results) for simulations across Last Interglacial (~130,000–116,000 BP) and Early Holocene (~11,700–8,000 BP).
This model was designed to study resilience in organizations. Inspired by ethnographic work, it follows the simple goal to understand whether team structure affects the way in which tasks are performed. In so doing, it compares the ‘hybrid’ data-inspired structure with three more traditional structures (i.e. hierarchy, flexible/relaxed hierarchy, and anarchy/disorganization).
FIsheries Simulation with Human COmplex DEcision-making (FISHCODE) is an agent-based model to depict and analyze current and future spatio-temporal dynamics of three German fishing fleets in the southern North Sea. Every agent (fishing vessel) makes daily decisions about if, what, and how long to fish. Weather, fuel and fish prices, as well as the actions of their colleagues influence agents’ decisions. To combine behavioral theories and enable agents to make dynamic decision, we implemented the Consumat approach, a framework in which agents’ decisions vary in complexity and social engagement depending on their satisfaction and uncertainty. Every agent has three satisfactions and two uncertainties representing different behavioral aspects, i.e. habitual behavior, profit maximization, competition, conformism, and planning insecurity. Availability of extensive information on fishing trips allowed us to parameterize many model parameters directly from data, while others were calibrated using pattern oriented modelling. Model validation showed that spatial and temporal aggregated ABM outputs were in realistic ranges when compared to observed data. Our ABM hence represents a tool to assess the impact of the ever growing challenges to North Sea fisheries and provides insight into fisher behavior beyond profit maximization.
This model is represents an effort to replicate one of the first attempts (van der Vaart 2006) to develop an agent based model of agricultural origins using principles and equations drawn from human behavioral ecology. We have taken one theory of habitat choice (Ideal Free Distribution) and applied it to human behavioral adaptations to differences in resource quality of different habitats.
Displaying 10 of 138 results human clear search