The meeting of researchers from MAS engineering and the social/economic/organizational sciences is extensively recognized for its role in cross-fertilization, and it has undoubtedly been an important source of inspiration for the body of knowledge that has been produced in the MAS area. The MABS workshop series continues with its goal to bring together researchers interested in MAS engineering, with researchers focused on finding efficient solutions to model complex social systems, in such areas as economics, management, organizational and social sciences in general. In all these areas, agent theories, metaphors, models, analysis, experimental designs, empirical studies, and methodological principles, all converge into simulation as a way of achieving explanations and predictions, exploration and testing of hypotheses, better designs and systems.

The range of technical issues that MABS has dealt with and continues to deal with is diverse and extensive and includes:

Simulation methodologies:

• Standards for MABS

• Methodologies and simulation languages for MABS

• Simulation platforms and tools for MABS

• Visualization and analytic tools

• Approaches for large-scale simulations

• Scalability and robustness in MABS

• Data-driven simulations

• MABS that link real-world data in real time.

• Handling Big Data in MABS including sense-making

• Simulation modelling of multidirectional (bottom-up and top-down) dynamics in complex social systems

• Provenance and ontology-driven approaches in building simulations

• Design and analysis of simulation experiments including uncertainty analysis

• Synthetic population generation

Simulation of social and economic behavior:

• Formal and agent models of social behavior

• Cognitive modeling and social simulation

• Game theory and simulation

• Social structure: social networks and simulating organizations

• Simulating social complexity (e.g. structures and norms, social order, emergence of cooperation and coordinated action, self-organization, the micro-macro link)

• Use of qualitative Evidence to inform behavioral rules

Applications:

• MABS in environmental modeling

• Agent-based experimental economics

• Participative-based simulation

• MABS and games

These topics are important for both the MAS community doing simulation, and for economic/social/organizational scientists doing simulation. The workshop is therefore relevant to the main conference, as simulation is one of the topics of the latter. On the other hand, as the workshop is already established as an important event during the conference it will bring more attendees from the social and economic domains to the main conference.