Tragedy of the Commons with Environmental Feedback: A Model of Human-AI Socio-Environmental Dilemma (1.0.0)

This project is an interactive agent-based model simulating consumption of a shared, renewable resource using a game-theoretic framework with environmental feedback. Although its original use was to simulate a ToC scenario with water as the shared resource, it can be applicable for a variety of scenarios including simulating climate disasters, environmental sensitivity to resource consumption, or influence of environmental degradation to agent behaviour. The primary goal of the model is to explore the socio-environmental feedback loops that lead to complex emergent system dynamics. It 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 of this model is the added environmental feedback with local resource replenishment.

Beyond its theoretical insights into coevolutionary dynamics, this ABM 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.

The model is built using Mesa 1.2.1 for the model and Solara for the interactive web-based dashboard. While Mesa version 3.0 was available at the time of this project’s finalization, version 1.2.1 was used to ensure functional correctness and maintain compatibility. Initial testing with Mesa 3.0 revealed significant, non-backward-compatible API changes relative to the 1.x series, which would have required a substantial rewrite of the existing, validated codebase. Therefore, to guarantee the stability and reproducibility of the results based on the original model implementation, version 1.2.1 was retained as the foundational dependency for this research.

Release Notes

Release v1.0.0 - Initial Public Release
This is the first public release of the Water Commons Agent-Based Model, a project developed to simulate and analyse socio-environmental dynamics in a shared resource system.

Key Features include:
-Human-AI interaction model: simulates resource competition between two heterogeneous agent types: residential households and industrial AI data centres.

Game-environment feedback: implements a co-evolutionary game where agent payoffs and strategies are dynamically linked to the health of the environment, based on the framework by Weitz et al. (2016).

Spatial resource dynamics: features a 2D grid where agents interact with spatially explicit water sources that have their own dynamic replenishment rates.

What’s included in documentation:
Complete source code for the Mesa model and server (visualized in Solara).
A detailed README document and a full academic report documenting the model and findings.

Associated Publications