Policymakers decide on alternative policies facing restricted budgets and uncertain future. Designing public policies is further difficult due to the need to decide on priorities and handle effects across policies. Housing policies, specifically, involve heterogeneous characteristics of properties themselves and the intricacy of housing markets and the spatial context of cities. We propose PolicySpace2 (PS2) as an adapted and extended version of the open source PolicySpace agent-based model. PS2 is a computer simulation that relies on empirically detailed spatial data to model real estate, along with labor, credit, and goods and services markets. Interaction among workers, firms, a bank, households and municipalities follow the literature benchmarks to integrate economic, spatial and transport scholarship. PS2 is applied to a comparison among three competing public policies aimed at reducing inequality and alleviating poverty: (a) house acquisition by the government and distribution to lower income households, (b) rental vouchers, and (c) monetary aid. Within the model context, the monetary aid, that is, smaller amounts of help for a larger number of households, makes the economy perform better in terms of production, consumption, reduction of inequality, and maintenance of financial duties. PS2 as such is also a framework that may be further adapted to a number of related research questions.

This NetLogo model is an implementation of the mostly verbal (and graphic) model in Jarret Walker’s Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives (2011). Walker’s discussion is in the chapter “Connections or Complexity?”. See especially figure 12-2, which is on page 151.

In “Connections or Complexity?”, Walker frames the matter as involving a choice between two conflicting goals. The first goal is to minimize connections, the need to make transfers, in a transit system. People naturally prefer direct routes. The second goal is to minimize complexity. Why? Well, read the chapter, but as a general proposition we want to avoid unnecessary complexity with its attendant operating characteristics (confusing route plans in the case of transit) and management and maintenance challenges. With complexity general comes degraded robustness and resilience.

How do we, how can we, choose between these conflicting goals? The grand suggestion here is that we only choose indirectly, implicitly. In the present example of connections versus complexity we model various alternatives and compare them on measures of performance (MoP) other than complexity or connections per se. The suggestion is that connections and complexity are indicators of, heuristics for, other MoPs that are more fundamental, such as cost, robustness, energy use, etc., and it is these that we at bottom care most about. (Alternatively, and not inconsistently, we can view connections and complexity as two of many MoPs, with the larger issue to be resolve in light of many MoPs, including but not limited to complexity and connections.) We employ modeling to get a handle on these MoPs. Typically, there will be several, taking us thus to a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) situation. That’s the big picture.

A road freight transport (RFT) operation involves the participation of several types of companies in its execution. The TRANSOPE model simulates the subcontracting process between 3 types of companies: Freight Forwarders (FF), Transport Companies (TC) and self-employed carriers (CA). These companies (agents) form transport outsourcing chains (TOCs) by making decisions based on supplier selection criteria and transaction acceptance criteria. Through their participation in TOCs, companies are able to learn and exchange information, so that knowledge becomes another important factor in new collaborations. The model can replicate multiple subcontracting situations at a local and regional geographic level.
The succession of n operations over d days provides two types of results: 1) Social Complex Networks, and 2) Spatial knowledge accumulation environments. The combination of these results is used to identify the emergence of new logistics clusters. The types of actors involved as well as the variables and parameters used have their justification in a survey of transport experts and in the existing literature on the subject.
As a result of a preferential selection process, the distribution of activity among agents shows to be highly uneven. The cumulative network resulting from the self-organisation of the system suggests a structure similar to scale-free networks (Albert & Barabási, 2001). In this sense, new agents join the network according to the needs of the market. Similarly, the network of preferential relationships persists over time. Here, knowledge transfer plays a key role in the assignment of central connector roles, whose participation in the outsourcing network is even more decisive in situations of scarcity of transport contracts.

This model was created to investigate the potential impacts of large-scale recreational and transport-related physical activity promotion strategies on six United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related outcomes—road traffic deaths (SDG 3), transportation mode share (SDG 9), convenient access to public transport, levels of fine particulate matter, and access to public open spaces (SDG 11), and levels of carbon dioxide emissions (SDG 13)—in three cities designed as abstract representations of common city types in high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

This is a Netlogo model which simulates car and bus/tram traffic in Augsburg, specifically between the districts Stadtbergen, Göggingen and the Königsplatz. People either use their cars or public transport to travel to one of their random destinations (Stadtbergen or Göggingen), performing some activity and then returning to their home. Attributes such as travel and waiting time as well as their happiness upon arriving are stored and have an impact on individuals on whether they would consider changing their mode of transport or not.

Style_Net_01 is a spatial agent-based model designed to serve as a platform for exploring geographic patterns of tool transport and discard among seasonally mobile hunter-gatherer populations. The model has four main levels: artifact, person, group, and system. Persons make, use, and discard artifacts. Persons travel in groups within the geographic space of the model. The movements of groups represent a seasonal pattern of aggregation and dispersal, with all groups coalescing at an aggregation site during one point of the yearly cycle. The scale of group mobility is controlled by a parameter. The creation, use, and discard of artifacts is controlled by several parameters that specify how many tools each person carries in a personal inventory, how many times each tool can be used before it is discarded, and the frequency of tool usage. A lithic source (representing a geographically-specific, recognizable source of stone for tools) can be placed anywhere in the geographic space of the model.

This model presents an autonomous, two-lane driving environment with a single lane-closure that can be toggled. The four driving scenarios - two baseline cases (based on the real-world) and two experimental setups - are as follows:

• Baseline-1 is where cars are not informed of the lane closure.
• Baseline-2 is where a Red Zone is marked wherein cars are informed of the lane closure ahead.
• Strategy-1 is where cars use a co-operative driving strategy - FAS. ^[1]
• Strategy-2 is a variant of Strategy-1 and uses comfortable deceleration values instead of the vehicle’s limit.
  …

The Episim framework builds upon the established transportation simulation MATSim and is capable of tracking agents’ movements within a network and thus computing infection chains. Several characteristics of the virus and the environment can be parametred, whilst the infection dynamics is computed based upon a compartment model. The spread of the virus can be mitigated by restricting the agents’ activity in certain places.

The purpose of the model is to generate the spatio-temporal distribution of bicycle traffic flows at a regional scale level. Disaggregated results are computed for each network segment with the minute time step. The human decision-making is governed by probabilistic rules derived from the mobility survey.

Our model is hybrid agent-based and equation based model for human air-borne infectious diseases measles. It follows an SEIR (susceptible, exposed,infected, and recovered) type compartmental model with the agents moving be-tween the four state relating to infectiousness. However, the disease model canswitch back and forth between agent-based and equation based depending onthe number of infected agents. Our society model is specific using the datato create a realistic synthetic population for a county in Ireland. The modelincludes transportation with agents moving between their current location anddesired destination using predetermined destinations or destinations selectedusing a gravity model.