Load shedding enjoys increasing popularity as a way to reduce power consumption in buildings during hours of peak demand on the electricity grid. This practice has well known cost saving and reliability benefits for the grid, and the contracts utilities sign with their “interruptible” customers often pass on substantial electricity cost savings to participants. Less well-studied are the impacts of load shedding on building occupants, hence this study investigates those impacts on occupant comfort and adaptive behaviors. It documents experience in two office buildings located near Philadelphia (USA) that vary in terms of controllability and the set of adaptive actions available to occupants. An agent-based model (ABM) framework generalizes the case-study insights in a “what-if” format to support operational decision making by building managers and tenants. The framework, implemented in EnergyPlus and NetLogo, simulates occupants that have heterogeneous
thermal and lighting preferences. The simulated occupants pursue local adaptive actions such as adjusting clothing or using portable fans when central building controls are not responsive, and experience organizational constraints, including a corporate dress code and miscommunication with building managers. The model predicts occupant decisions to act fairly well but has limited ability to predict which specific adaptive actions occupants will select.

We reconstruct Cohen, March and Olsen’s Garbage Can model of organizational choice as an agent-based model. We add another means for avoiding making decisions: buck-passing difficult problems to colleagues.

We present a network agent-based model of ethnocentrism and intergroup cooperation in which agents from two groups (majority and minority) change their communality (feeling of group solidarity), cooperation strategy and social ties, depending on a barrier of “likeness” (affinity). Our purpose was to study the model’s capability for describing how the mechanisms of preexisting markers (or “tags”) that can work as cues for inducing in-group bias, imitation, and reaction to non-cooperating agents, lead to ethnocentrism or intergroup cooperation and influence the formation of the network of mixed ties between agents of different groups. We explored the model’s behavior via four experiments in which we studied the combined effects of “likeness,” relative size of the minority group, degree of connectivity of the social network, game difficulty (strength) and relative frequencies of strategy revision and structural adaptation. The parameters that have a stronger influence on the emerging dominant strategies and the formation of mixed ties in the social network are the group-tag barrier, the frequency with which agents react to adverse partners, and the game difficulty. The relative size of the minority group also plays a role in increasing the percentage of mixed ties in the social network. This is consistent with the intergroup ties being dependent on the “arena” of contact (with progressively stronger barriers from e.g. workmates to close relatives), and with measures that hinder intergroup contact also hindering mutual cooperation.

The model answers the question how homophily and number of close-links in small-world network influences behavior of consumats. The results show that the more close-links the more probable the consumat follows the major behavior, but homophilly blocks the major behavior and supports survival of the minor behavior.

We develop a spatial, evolutionary model of the endogenous formation and dissolution of groups using a renewable common pool resource. We use this foundation to measure the evolutionary pressures at different organizational levels.

We model interpersonal dynamics and study behavior in the classroom in the hypothetical case of a single teacher who defines students’ seating arrangements. The model incorporates the mechanisms of peer influence on study behavior, on attitude formation, and homophilous selection in order to depict the interrelated dynamics of networks, behavior, and attitudes. We compare various seating arrangement scenarios and observe how GPA distribution and level of prejudice changes over time.

This model accompanies a paper looking at the role and limits of values and norms for modeling realistic social agents. Based on literature we synthesize a theory on norms and a theory that combines both values and norms. In contrast to previous work, these theories are checked against data on human behavior obtained from a psychological experiment on dividing money: the ultimatum game. We found that agents that act according to a theory that combines both values and norms, produce behavior quite similar to that of humans. Furthermore, we found that this theory is more realistic than theories solely concerned with norms or theories solely concerned with values. However, to explain the amount of money people accept in this ultimatum game we will eventually need an even more realistic theory. We propose that a theory that explains when people exactly choose to use norms instead of values could provide this realism.

The model aims at estimating household energy consumption and the related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction based on the behavior of the individual household under different operationalizations of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB).
The original model is developed as a tool to explore households decisions regarding solar panel investments and cumulative consequences of these individual choices (i.e. diffusion of PVs, regional emissions savings, monetary savings). We extend the model to explore a methodological question regarding an interpretation of qualitative concepts from social science theories, specifically Theory of Planned Behaviour in a formal code of quantitative agent-based models (ABMs). We develop 3 versions of the model: one TPB-based ABM designed by the authors and two alternatives inspired by the TPB-ABM of Schwarz and Ernst (2009) and the TPB-ABM of Rai and Robinson (2015). The model is implemented in NetLogo.

The BENCH agent-based model is designed and developed to study shifts in residential energy use and corresponding emissions driven by behavioral changes among heterogeneous individuals.

The Mission San Diego model is an epidemiological model designed to test hypotheses related to the spread of the 1805-1806 measles epidemic among indigenous residents of Mission San Diego during the early mission period in Alta California. The model community is based on the population of the Mission San Diego community, as listed in the parish documents (baptismal, marriage, and death records). Model agents are placed on a map-like grid that consists of houses, the mission church, a women’s dormitory (monjeria) adjacent to the church, a communal kitchen, priest’s quarters, and agricultural fields. They engage in daily activities that reflect known ethnographic patterns of behavior at the mission. A pathogen is introduced into the community and then it spreads throughout the population as a consequence of individual agent movements and interactions.