Computational Model Library

Displaying 10 of 417 results social clear

Peer reviewed Avian pest control: Yield outcome due to insectivorous birds, falconry, and integration of nest boxes.

David Jung | Published Monday, November 13, 2023 | Last modified Sunday, November 19, 2023

The model aims to simulate predator-prey relationships in an agricultural setting. The focus lies on avian communities and their effect on different pest organisms (here: pest birds, rodents, and arthropod pests). Since most case studies focused on the impact on arthropod pests (AP) alone, this model attempts to include effects on yield outcome. By incorporating three treatments with different factor levels (insectivorous bird species, falconry, nest box density) an experimental setup is given that allows for further statistical analysis to identify an optimal combination of the treatments.
In light of a global decline of birds, insects, and many other groups of organisms, alternative practices of pest management are heavily needed to reduce the input of pesticides. Avian pest control therefore poses an opportunity to bridge the disconnect between humans and nature by realizing ecosystem services and emphasizing sustainable social ecological systems.

Political Participation

Didier Ruedin | Published Saturday, April 12, 2014 | Last modified Saturday, November 18, 2023

Implementation of Milbrath’s (1965) model of political participation. Individual participation is determined by stimuli from the political environment, interpersonal interaction, as well as individual characteristics.

Social distancing is a strategy to mitigate the spread of contagious disease, but it bears negative impacts on people’s social well-being, resulting in non-compliance. This paper uses an integrated behavioral simulation model, called HUMAT, to identify a sweet spot
that balances strictness of and obedience to social distancing rules.

A novel agent-based model was developed that aims to explore social interaction while it is constrained by visitor limitations (due to Dutch COVID measures). Specifically, the model aims to capture the interaction between the need for social contact and the support for the visitors measure. The model was developed using the HUMAT integrated framework, which offered a psychological and sociological foundation for the behavior of the agents.

An ABM of changes in individuals’ lifestyles which considers their
evolving behavioural choices. Individuals have a set of environmental behavioural traits that spread through a fixed Watts–Strogatz graph via social interactions with their neighbours. These exchanges are mediated by transmission biases informing from whom an individual learns and
how much attention is paid. The influence of individuals on each other is a function of their similarity in environmental identity, where we represent environmental identity computationally by aggregating past agent attitudes towards multiple environmentally related behaviours. To perform a behaviour, agents must both have
a sufficiently positive attitude toward a behaviour and overcome a corresponding threshold. This threshold
structure, where the desire to perform a behaviour does not equal its enactment, allows for a lack of coherence
between attitudes and actual emissions. This leads to a disconnect between what people believe and what

This research article presents an agent-based simulation hereinafter called COMMONSIM. It builds on COMMONISM, i.e. a large-scale commons-based vision for a utopian society. In this society, production and distribution of means are not coordinated via markets, exchange, and money, or a central polity, but via bottom-up signalling and polycentric networks, i.e. ex-ante coordination via needs. Heterogeneous agents care for each other in life groups and produce in different groups care, environmental as well as intermediate and final means to satisfy sensual-vital needs. Productive needs decide on the magnitude of activity in groups for a common interest, e.g. the production of means in a multi-sectoral artificial economy. Agents share cultural traits identified by different behaviour: a propensity for egoism, leisure, environmentalism, and productivity. The narrative of this utopian society follows principles of critical psychology and sociology, complexity and evolution, the theory of commons, and critical political economy. The article presents the utopia and an agent-based study of it, with emphasis on culture-dependent allocation mechanisms and their social and economic implications for agents and groups.

Peer reviewed Yards

Emily Minor Soraida Garcia srailsback Philip Johnson | Published Thursday, November 02, 2023

This is a model of plant communities in urban and suburban residential neighborhoods. These plant communities are of interest because they provide many benefits to human residents and also provide habitat for wildlife such as birds and pollinators. The model was designed to explore the social factors that create spatial patterns in biodiversity in yards and gardens. In particular, the model was originally developed to determine whether mimicry behaviors–-or neighbors copying each other’s yard design–-could produce observed spatial patterns in vegetation. Plant nurseries and socio-economic constraints were also added to the model as other potential sources of spatial patterns in plant communities.

The idea for the model was inspired by empirical patterns of spatial autocorrelation that have been observed in yard vegetation in Chicago, Illinois (USA), and other cities, where yards that are closer together are more similar than yards that are farther apart. The idea is further supported by literature that shows that people want their yards to fit into their neighborhood. Currently, the yard attribute of interest is the number of plant species, or species richness. Residents compare the richness of their yards to the richness of their neighbors’ yards. If a resident’s yard is too different from their neighbors, the resident will be unhappy and change their yard to make it more similar.

The model outputs information about the diversity and identity of plant species in each yard. This can be analyzed to look for spatial autocorrelation patterns in yard diversity and to explore relationships between mimicry behaviors, yard diversity, and larger scale diversity.

This documentation provides an overview and explanation of the NetLogo simulation code for modeling skilled workers’ migration in Iran. The simulation aims to explore the dynamics of skilled workers’ migration and their transition through various states, including training, employment, and immigration.

The flow of elite and talent migration, or “brain drain,” is a complex issue with far-reaching implications for developing countries. The decision to migrate is made due to various factors including economic opportunities, political stability, social factors and personal circumstances.
Measuring individual interests in the field of immigration is a complex task that requires careful consideration of various factors. The agent-based model is a useful tool for understanding the complex factors that are involved in talent migration. By considering the various social, economic, and personal factors that influence migration decisions, policymakers can provide more effective strategies to retain skilled and talented labor and promote sustainable growth in developing countries. One of the main challenges in studying the flow of elite migration is the complexity of the decision-making process and a set of factors that lead to migration decisions. Agent-based modeling is a useful tool for understanding how individual decisions can lead to large-scale migration patterns.

An Agent-Based Model of Space Settlements

Anamaria Berea | Published Wednesday, August 09, 2023 | Last modified Wednesday, November 01, 2023

Background: Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the colonizers will be dependent on Earth resupply and replenishment of necessities via technological means, i.e., splitting Martian water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. Beyond the technical and engineering challenges, future colonists will also face psychological and human behavior challenges.
Objective: Our goal is to better understand the behavioral and psychological interactions of future Martian colonists through an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM simulation) approach. We seek to identify areas of consideration for planning a colony as well as propose a minimum initial population size required to create a stable colony.
Methods: Accounting for engineering and technological limitations, we draw on research regarding high performing teams in isolated and high stress environments (ex: submarines, Arctic exploration, ISS, war) to include the 4 NASA personality types within the ABM. Interactions between agents with different psychological profiles are modeled at the individual level, while global events such as accidents or delays in Earth resupply affect the colony as a whole.
Results: From our multiple simulations and scenarios (up to 28 Earth years), we found that an initial population of 22 was the minimum required to maintain a viable colony size over the long run. We also found that the Agreeable personality type was the one more likely to survive.
Conclusion We developed a simulation with easy to use GUI to explore various scenarios of human interactions (social, labor, economic, psychological) on a future colony on Mars. We included technological and engineering challenges, but our focus is on the behavioral and psychological effects on the sustainability of the colony on the long run. We find, contrary to other literature, that the minimum number of people with all personality types that can lead to a sustainable settlement is in the tens and not hundreds.

An agent-based framework to simulate the diffusion process of a piece of misinformation according to the SBFC model in which the fake news and its debunking compete in a social network. Considering new classes of agents, this model is closer to reality and proposed different strategies how to mitigate and control misinformation.

Peer reviewed An extended replication of Abelson's and Bernstein's community referendum simulation

Klaus Troitzsch | Published Friday, October 25, 2019 | Last modified Friday, August 25, 2023

This is an extended replication of Abelson’s and Bernstein’s early computer simulation model of community referendum controversies which was originally published in 1963 and often cited, but seldom analysed in detail. This replication is in NetLogo 6.3.0, accompanied with an ODD+D protocol and class and sequence diagrams.

This replication replaces the original scales for attitude position and interest in the referendum issue which were distributed between 0 and 1 with values that are initialised according to a normal distribution with mean 0 and variance 1 to make simulation results easier compatible with scales derived from empirical data collected in surveys such as the European Value Study which often are derived via factor analysis or principal component analysis from the answers to sets of questions.

Another difference is that this model is not only run for Abelson’s and Bernstein’s ten week referendum campaign but for an arbitrary time in order that one can find out whether the distributions of attitude position and interest in the (still one-dimensional) issue stabilise in the long run.

Displaying 10 of 417 results social clear

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