Reusing existing material stocks in developed built environments can significantly reduce the environmental footprint of the construction and demolition sector. However, material reuse in urban areas presents technical, temporal, and geographical challenges. Although a better understanding of spatial and temporal changes in material stocks could improve city resource management, limited scientific contributions have addressed this challenge.
This study details the steps followed in developing a spatially explicit rule-based simulation of materials stock. The simulation provides a proof of concept by incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of construction and demolition activities to analyse how various urban parameters determine material flows and embodied carbon in urban areas. The model explores the effects of 1) re-using recycled materials, 2) demolitions, 3) renovations and 4) various building typologies.
To showcase the model’s capabilities, the residential building stock of Gothenburg City is used as a case study, and eight building materials are tracked. Environmental impacts (A1-A3) are calculated with embodied carbon factors. The main parameters are explored in a baseline scenario. Then, a second scenario focuses on a hypothetical policy that promotes improvements in building energy performance.
The simulation can be expanded to include more materials and built environment assets and allows for future explorations on, for example, the role of logistics, the implementation of recycling or reuse stations, and, in general, supporting sustainable and circular strategies from the construction sector.

Agent-Based-Modeling - space colonization
ask me for the .nlogo model
WHAT IS IT?
The goal of this project is to simulate with NetLogo (v6.2) a space colonization of humans, starting from Earth, into the Milky Way.

HOW IT WORKS
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This model simulates diffusion curves and it allows to test how social influence, network structure and consumer heterogeneity affect their spreads and their speeds.

A stylized scale model to codesign with villagers an agent-based model of bushmeat hunting in the periphery of Korup National Park (Cameroon)

The FishCensus model simulates underwater visual census methods, where a diver estimates the abundance of fish. A separate model is used to shape species behaviours and save them to a file that can be shared and used by the counting model.

This model implements a Bayesian belief revision model that contrasts an ideal agent in possesion of true likelihoods, an agent using a fixed estimate of trusting its source of information, and an agent updating its trust estimate.

The purpose of this model is to explore the effects of different power structures on a cross-functional team’s prosocial decision making. Are certain power distributions more conducive to the team making prosocial decisions?

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).

We present an Agent-Based Stock Flow Consistent Multi-Country model of a Currency Union to analyze the impact of changes in the fiscal regimes that is permanent changes in the deficit-to-GDP targets that governments commit to comply.

Decision-makers often have to act before critical times to avoid the collapse of ecosystems using knowledge \textcolor{red}{that can be incomplete or biased}. Adaptive management may help managers tackle such issues. However, because the knowledge infrastructure required for adaptive management may be mobilized in several ways, we study the quality and the quantity of knowledge provided by this knowledge infrastructure. In order to analyze the influence of mobilized knowledge, we study how the following typology of knowledge and its use may impact the safe operating space of exploited ecosystems: 1) knowledge of the past based on a time series distorted by measurement errors; 2) knowledge of the current systems’ dynamics based on the representativeness of the decision-makers’ mental models of the exploited ecosystem; 3) knowledge of future events based on decision-makers’ likelihood estimates of extreme events based on modeling infrastructure (models and experts to interpret them) they have at their disposal. We consider different adaptive management strategies of a general regulated exploited ecosystem model and we characterize the robustness of these strategies to biased knowledge. Our results show that even with significant mobilized knowledge and optimal strategies, imperfect knowledge may still shrink the safe operating space of the system leading to the collapse of the system. However, and perhaps more interestingly, we also show that in some cases imperfect knowledge may unexpectedly increase the safe operating space by suggesting cautious strategies.
The code enables to calculate the safe operating spaces of different managers in the case of biased and unbiased knowledge.