We develop an agent-based model (U-TRANS) to simulate the transition of an abstract city under an industrial revolution. By coupling the labour and housing markets, we propose a holistic framework that incorporates the key interacting factors and micro processes during the transition. Using U-TRANS, we look at five urban transition scenarios: collapse, weak recovery, transition, enhanced training and global recruit, and find the model is able to generate patterns observed in the real world. For example, We find that poor neighbourhoods benefit the most from growth in the new industry, whereas the rich neighbourhoods do better than the rest when the growth is slow or the situation deteriorates. We also find a (subtle) trade-off between growth and equality. The strategy to recruit a large number of skilled workers globally will lead to higher growth in GDP, population and human capital, but it will also entail higher inequality and market volatility, and potentially create a divide between the local and international workers. The holistic framework developed in this paper will help us better understand urban transition and detect early signals in the process. It can also be used as a test-bed for policy and growth strategies to help a city during a major economic and technological revolution.

PolicySpace models public policies within an empirical, spatial environment using data from 46 metropolitan regions in Brazil. The model contains citizens, markets, residences, municipalities, commuting and a the tax scheme. In the associated publications (book in press and https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00259) we validate the model and demonstrate an application of the fiscal analysis. Besides providing the basics of the platform, our results indicate the relevance of the rules of taxes transfer for cities’ quality of life.

A letter sending model with historically informed initial positions to reconstruct communication and archiving processes in the Republic of Letters, the 15th to 17th century form of scholarship.

The model is aimed at historians, willing to formalize historical assumptions about the letter sending process itself and allows in principle to set heterogeneous social roles, e.g. to evaluate the role of gender or social status in the formation of letter exchange networks. The model furthermore includes a pruning process to simulate the loss of letters to critically asses the role of biases e.g. in relation to gender, geographical regions, or power structures, in the creation of empirical letter archives.

Each agent has an initial random topic vector, expressed as a RGB value. The initial positions of the agents are based on a weighted random draw based on data from [2]. In each step, agents generate two neighbourhoods for sending letters and potential targets to move towards. The probability to send letters is a self-reinforcing process. After each sending the internal topic of the receiver is updated as a movement in abstract space by a random amount towards the letters topic.

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The NIER model is intended to add qualitative variables of building owner types and peer group scales to existing energy efficiency retrofit adoption models. The model was developed through a combined methodology with qualitative research, which included interviews with key stakeholders in Cleveland, Ohio and Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The concepts that the NIER model adds to traditional economic feasibility studies of energy retrofit decision-making are differences in building owner types (reflecting strategies for managing buildings) and peer group scale (neighborhoods of various sizes and large-scale Districts). Insights from the NIER model include: large peer group comparisons can quickly raise the average energy efficiency values of Leader and Conformist building owner types, but leave Stigma-avoider owner types as unmotivated to retrofit; policy interventions such as upgrading buildings to energy-related codes at the point of sale can motivate retrofits among the lowest efficient buildings, which are predominantly represented by the Stigma-avoider type of owner; small neighborhood peer groups can successfully amplify normal retrofit incentives.