Background: Establishing a human settlement on Mars is an incredibly complex engineering problem. The inhospitable nature of the Martian environment requires any habitat to be largely self-sustaining. Beyond mining a few basic minerals and water, the colonizers will be dependent on Earth resupply and replenishment of necessities via technological means, i.e., splitting Martian water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel. Beyond the technical and engineering challenges, future colonists will also face psychological and human behavior challenges.
Objective: Our goal is to better understand the behavioral and psychological interactions of future Martian colonists through an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM simulation) approach. We seek to identify areas of consideration for planning a colony as well as propose a minimum initial population size required to create a stable colony.
Methods: Accounting for engineering and technological limitations, we draw on research regarding high performing teams in isolated and high stress environments (ex: submarines, Arctic exploration, ISS, war) to include the 4 NASA personality types within the ABM. Interactions between agents with different psychological profiles are modeled at the individual level, while global events such as accidents or delays in Earth resupply affect the colony as a whole.
Results: From our multiple simulations and scenarios (up to 28 Earth years), we found that an initial population of 22 was the minimum required to maintain a viable colony size over the long run. We also found that the Agreeable personality type was the one more likely to survive.
Conclusion We developed a simulation with easy to use GUI to explore various scenarios of human interactions (social, labor, economic, psychological) on a future colony on Mars. We included technological and engineering challenges, but our focus is on the behavioral and psychological effects on the sustainability of the colony on the long run. We find, contrary to other literature, that the minimum number of people with all personality types that can lead to a sustainable settlement is in the tens and not hundreds.

The model represents an archetypical fishery in a co-evolutionary social-ecological environment, capturing different dimensions of trust between fishers and fish buyers for the establishment and persistence of self-governance arrangements.

This is an opinion dynamics model which extends the model found in (Martins 2009). The previous model had an unshared uncertainty assumption in agent-to-agent interaction this model relaxes that assumption. The model only supports a fully connect network where every agent has an equal likelihood of interacting with every other agent at any given time step. The model is highly modular so different social network paradigm can easier be implemented.

Simulates impacts of ants killing colony mates when in conflict with another nest. The murder rate is adjustable, and the environmental change is variable. The colonies employ social learning so knowledge diffusion proceeds if interactions occur.

Purpose of the model is to perform a “virtual experiment” to test the predator satiation hypothesis, advanced in literature to explain the mast seeding phenomenon.

An ABM to simulate the spatio-temporal distribution of cyclists across the road network of the city of Salzburg.

This model uses ’satisficing’ as a model for farmers’ decision making to learn about influences of alternative decision-making models on simulation results and to exemplify a way to transform a rather theoretical concept into a feasible decision-making model for agent-based farming models.

Agent based approach to the class of the Integrated Assessment Models. An agent-based model (ABM) that focuses on the energy sector and climate relevant facts in a detailed way while being complemented with consumer goods, labour and capital markets to a minimal necessary extent.

The model simulates agents behaviour in wine market parallel trading systems: auctions, OTC and Liv-ex. Models are written in JAVA and use MASON framework. To run a simulation download source files with additional src folder with sobol.csv file. In WineSimulation.java set RESULTS_FOLDER parameter. Uses following external libraries mason19..jar, opencsv.jar, commons-lang3-3.5.jar and commons-math3-3.6.1.jar.

This model simulates the behaviour of the agents in 3 wine markets parallel trading systems: Liv-ex, Auctions and additionally OTC market (finally not used). Behavioural aspects (impatience) is additionally modeled. This is an extention of parallel trading systems model with technical trading (momentum and contrarian) and noise trading.