Violence against women occurs predominantly in the family and domestic context. The COVID-19 pandemic led Brazil to recommend and, at times, impose social distancing, with the partial closure of economic activities, schools, and restrictions on events and public services. Preliminary evidence shows that intense co- existence increases domestic violence, while social distancing measures may have prevented access to public services and networks, information, and help. We propose an agent-based model (ABM), called VIDA, to illustrate and examine multi-causal factors that influence events that generate violence. A central part of the model is the multi-causal stress indicator, created as a probability trigger of domestic violence occurring within the family environment. Two experimental design tests were performed: (a) absence or presence of the deterrence system of domestic violence against women and measures to increase social distancing. VIDA presents comparative results for metropolitan regions and neighbourhoods considered in the experiments. Results suggest that social distancing measures, particularly those encouraging staying at home, may have increased domestic violence against women by about 10%. VIDA suggests further that more populated areas have comparatively fewer cases per hundred thousand women than less populous capitals or rural areas of urban concentrations. This paper contributes to the literature by formalising, to the best of our knowledge, the first model of domestic violence through agent-based modelling, using empirical detailed socioeconomic, demographic, educational, gender, and race data at the intraurban level (census sectors).

This model aims to investigate how different type of learning (social system) and disturbance specific attributes (ecological system) influence adoption of treatment strategies to treat the effects of ecological disturbances.

Cultural group selection model used to evaluate the conditions for agents to evolve who have other-regarding preferences in making decisions in public good games.

This model simulates a foraging system based on Middle Stone Age plant and shellfish foraging in South Africa.

This model is intended to study the way information is collectively managed (i.e. shared, collected, processed, and stored) in a system and how it performs during a crisis or disaster. Performance is assessed in terms of the system’s ability to provide the information needed to the actors who need it when they need it. There are two main types of actors in the simulation, namely communities and professional responders. Their ability to exchange information is crucial to improve the system’s performance as each of them has direct access to only part of the information they need.

In a nutshell, the following occurs during a simulation. Due to a disaster, a series of randomly occurring disruptive events takes place. The actors in the simulation need to keep track of such events. Specifically, each event generates information needs for the different actors, which increases the information gaps (i.e. the “piles” of unaddressed information needs). In order to reduce the information gaps, the actors need to “discover” the pieces of information they need. The desired behavior or performance of the system is to keep the information gaps as low as possible, which is to address as many information needs as possible as they occur.

The Social Identity Model of Protest Emergence (SIMPE), an agent-based model of national identity and protest mobilisations.

I developed this model for my PhD project, “Polarisation and Protest Mobilisation Around Secessionist Movements: an Agent-Based Model of Online and Offline Social Networks”, at the University of Glasgow (2019-2023).

The purpose of this model is to simulate protest emergence in a given country where there is an independence movement, fostering the self-categorisation process of national identification. In order to contextualised SIMPE, I have used Catalonia, where an ongoing secessionist movement since 2011 has been present, national identity has shown signs of polarisation, and where numerous mobilisations have taken place over the last decade. Data from the Catalan Centre of Opinion Studies (CEO) has been used to inform some of the model parameters.

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This is a stylised agent-based model designed to explore the conditions that lead to lock-ins and transitions in agri-food systems.

The model represents interactions between four different types of agents: farmers, consumers, markets, and the state. Farmers and consumers are heterogeneous, and at each time step decide whether to trade with one of two market agents: the conventional or alternative. The state agent provides subsidies to the farmers at each time step.

The key emergent outcome is the fraction of trade in each time step that flows through the alternative market agent. This arises from the distributed decisions of farmer and consumer agents. A “sustainability transition” is defined as a shift in the dominant practices (and associated balance of power) towards the alternative paradigm.

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ARMM is a theoretical agent-based model that formalizes Murra’s Theory of Verticality (Murra, 1972) to explore how multi-zonal resource management systems emerge in mountain landscapes. The model identifies the social, political, and economic mechanisms that enable vertical complementarity across ecological gradients.
Built in NetLogo, ARMM employs an abstract 111×111 grid divided into four Andean ecological zones (Altiplano, Highland, Lowland, Coast), each containing up to 18 resource types distributed according to ecological suitability. To test general theoretical principles rather than replicate specific geography, resource locations are randomized at each model initialization.
Settlement agents pursue one of two economic strategies: diversification (seeking resource variety, maximum 2 units per type) or accumulation (maximising total quantity, maximum 30 units). Agents move between adjacent zones through hierarchical decision-making, first attempting peaceful interactions—coexistence (governed by tolerance) and trading (governed by cooperation)—before resorting to conflict (theft or takeover, governed by belligerence).
The model demonstrates that vertical complementarity can emerge through fundamentally different mechanisms: either through autonomous mobility under political decentralization or through state-coordinated redistribution under centralization. Sensitivity analysis reveals that belligerence and economic strategy explain approximately 25% of outcome variance, confirming that structural inequalities between zones result from political-economic organization rather than environmental constraints alone.
As a preliminary theoretical model, ARMM intentionally maintains simplicity to isolate core mechanisms and generate testable hypotheses. This foundational framework will guide future empirically-calibrated versions that incorporate specific archaeological settlement data and geographic features from the Carangas region (Bolivia-Chile border), enabling direct comparison between theoretical predictions and observed historical patterns.

This is an initial exploratory exercise done for the class @ http://thiagomarzagao.com/teaching/ipea/ Text available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04429v1
The program:
Reads output from an ABM model and its parameters’ configuration
Creates a socioeconomic optimal output based on two ABM results of the modelers choice
Organizes the data as X and Y matrices
Trains some Machine Learning algorithms
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