MayaSim is an agent-based, cellular automata and network model of the ancient Maya. Biophysical and anthropogenic processes interact to grow a complex social ecological system.

The purpose of the model is to simulate the spatial dynamics of potato late blight to analyse whether resistant varieties can be used effectively for sustainable disease control. The model represents an agricultural landscape with potato fields and data of a Dutch agricultural region is used as input for the model. We simulated potato production, disease spread and pathogen evolution during the growing season (April to September) for 36 years. Since late blight development and crop growth is weather dependent, measured weather data is used as model input. A susceptible and late blight resistant potato variety are distinguished. The resistant variety has a potentially lower yield but cannot get infected with the disease. However, during the growing season virulent spores can emerge as a result of mutations during spore production. This new virulent strain is able to infect the resistant fields, resulting in resistance breakdown. The model shows how disease severity, resistance durability and potato yield are affected by the fraction of fields across a landscape with a disease-resistant potato variety.

While the world’s total urban population continues to grow, not all cities are witnessing such growth, some are actually shrinking. This shrinkage causes several problems to emerge including population loss, economic depression, vacant properties and the contraction of housing markets. Such problems challenge efforts to make cities sustainable. While there is a growing body of work on study shrinking cities, few explore such a phenomenon from the bottom up using dynamic computational models. To overcome this issue this paper presents an spatially explicit agent-based model stylized on the Detroit Tri-county area, an area witnessing shrinkage. Specifically, the model demonstrates how through the buying and selling of houses can lead to urban shrinkage from the bottom up. The model results indicate that along with the lower level housing transactions being captured, the aggregated level market conditions relating to urban shrinkage are also captured (i.e., the contraction of housing markets). As such, the paper demonstrates the potential of simulation to explore urban shrinkage and potentially offers a means to test polices to achieve urban sustainability.

This model is an agent-based simulation written in Python 2.7, which simulates the cost of social care in an ageing UK population. The simulation incorporates processes of population change which affect the demand for and supply of social care, including health status, partnership formation, fertility and mortality. Fertility and mortality rates are drawn from UK population data, then projected forward to 2050 using the methods developed by Lee and Carter 1992.

The model demonstrates that rising life expectancy combined with lower birthrates leads to growing social care costs across the population. More surprisingly, the model shows that the oft-proposed intervention of raising the retirement age has limited utility; some reductions in costs are attained initially, but these reductions taper off beyond age 70. Subsequent work has enhanced and extended this model by adding more detail to agent behaviours and familial relationships.

The version of the model provided here produces outputs in a format compatible with the GEM-SA uncertainty quantification software by Kennedy and O’Hagan. This allows sensitivity analyses to be performed using Gaussian Process Emulation.

The purpose of this model is the simulation of social care provision in the UK, in which individual agents can decide to provide informal care, or pay for private care, for their loved ones. Agents base these decisions on factors including their own health, employment status, financial resources, relationship to the individual in need and geographical location. The model simulates care provision as a negotiation process conducted between agents across their kinship networks, with agents with stronger familial relationships to the recipient being more likely to attempt to allocate time to care provision. The model also simulates demographic change, the impact of socioeconomic status, and allows agents to relocate and change jobs or reduce working hours in order to provide care.
Despite the relative lack of empirical data in this model, the model is able to reproduce plausible patterns of social care provision. The inclusion of detailed economic and behavioural mechanisms allows this model to serve as a useful policy development tool; complex behavioural interventions can be implemented in simulation and tested on a virtual population before applying them in real-world contexts.

Previous work with the spatial iterated prisoner’s dilemma has shown that “walk away” cooperators are able to outcompete defectors as well as cooperators that do not respond to defection, but it remains to be seen just how robust the so-called walk away strategy is to ecologically important variables such as population density, error, and offspring dispersal. Our simulation experiments identify socio-ecological conditions in which natural selection favors strategies that emphasize forgiveness over flight in the spatial iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Our interesting results are best explained by considering how population density, error, and offspring dispersal affect the opportunity cost associated with walking away from an error-prone partner.

The Regional Security Game is a iterated public goods game with punishement based on based on life sciences work by Boyd et al. (2003 ) and Hintze & Adami (2015 ), with modifications appropriate for an international relations setting. The game models a closed regional system in which states compete over the distribution of common security benefits. Drawing on recent work applying cultural evolutionary paradigms in the social sciences, states learn through imitation of successful strategies rather than making instrumentally rational choices. The model includes the option to fit empirical data to the model, with two case studies included: Europe in 1933 on the verge of war and south-east Asia in 2013.

GenoScope is a modular agent-based model designed to simulate how cells respond to environmental stressors or other treatment conditions across species. Genes, treatment conditions, and cell physiology outcomes are represented as interacting agents that influence each other’s behavior over time. Rather than imposing fixed interaction rules, GenoScope initializes with randomized regulatory logic and calibrates rule sets based on empirical data. Calibration is grounded in a common-garden experiment involving 16 mammalian species—including humans, dolphins, bats, and camels—exposed to varying levels of temperature, glucose, and oxygen. This comparative approach enables the identification of mechanisms by which animal cells achieve robustness under extreme environmental conditions.

The Megafaunal Hunting Pressure Model (MHPM) is an interactive, agent-based model designed to conduct experiments to test megaherbivore extinction hypotheses. The MHPM is a model of large-bodied ungulate population dynamics with human predation in a simplified, but dynamic grassland environment. The overall purpose of the model is to understand how environmental dynamics and human predation preferences interact with ungulate life history characteristics to affect ungulate population dynamics over time. The model considers patterns in environmental change, human hunting behavior, prey profitability, herd demography, herd movement, and animal life history as relevant to this main purpose. The model is constructed in the NetLogo modeling platform (Version 6.3.0; Wilensky, 1999).

A System Dynamics Model to anticipate insurgent movements and policy design to handle them .