Identifying how organisms respond to environmental stressors remains of central importance as human impacts continue to shift the environmental conditions for countless species. Some mammals are able to mitigate these environmental stressors at the cellular level, but the mechanisms by which cells are able to do this and how these strategies vary among species is not well understood. At the cellular level, it is difficult to identify the temporal dynamics of the system through empirical data because fine-grained time course samples are both incomplete and limited by available resources. To help identify the mechanisms by which animal cells mitigate extreme environmental conditions, we propose an agent-based model to capture the dynamics of the system. In the model, agents are regulatory elements and genes, and are able to impact the behaviors of each other. Rather than imposing rules for these interactions among agents, we will begin with randomized sets of rules and calibrate the model based on empirical data of cellular responses to stress. We will apply a common-garden framework to cultured cells from 16 mammalian species, which will yield genomic data and measures of cell morphology and physiology when exposed to different levels of temperature, glucose, and oxygen. These species include humans, dolphins, bats, and camels, among others, which vary in how they respond to environmental stressors, offering a comparative approach for identifying mechanistic rules whereby cells achieve robustness to environmental stressors. For calibration of the model, we will iteratively select for rules that best lead to the emergent outcomes observed in the cellular assays. Our model is generalized for any species, any cell type, and any environmental stressor, offering many applications of the model beyond our study. This study will increase our understanding of how organisms mitigate environmental stressors at the cellular level such that we can better address how organisms are impacted by and respond to extreme environmental conditions.

This model is an agent-based simulation that consists of agents who play the spatial prisioner’s dilemma game with coalition formation. The coalition dynamics are mainly influenced by how much the agents trust their leaders. The main objective is provide a simulation model to enable the analysis of the impacts that the use of trust may cause in coalition formation.

The purpose of this model is to analyze the dynamics of endogenously created oscillations in housing prices using a system dynamics simulation model, built from the perspective of construction companies.

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.

A more complete description of the model can be found in Appendix I as an ODD protocol. This model is an expansion of the Hemelrijk (1996) that was expanded to include a simple food seeking behavior.

An agent based simulation of a political process based on stakeholder narratives

Schelling famously proposed an extremely simple but highly illustrative social mechanism to understand how strong ethnic segregation could arise in a world where individuals do not necessarily want it. Schelling’s simple computational model is the starting point for our extensions in which we build upon Wilensky’s original NetLogo implementation of this model. Our two NetLogo models can be best studied while reading our chapter “Agent-based Computational Models” (Flache and de Matos Fernandes, 2021). In the chapter, we propose 10 best practices to elucidate how agent-based models are a unique method for providing and analyzing formally precise, and empirically plausible mechanistic explanations of puzzling social phenomena, such as segregation, in the social world. Our chapter addresses in particular analytical sociologists who are new to ABMs.

In the first model (SegregationExtended), we build on Wilensky’s implementation of Schelling’s model which is available in NetLogo library (Wilensky, 1997). We considerably extend this model, allowing in particular to include larger neighborhoods and a population with four groups roughly resembling the ethnic composition of a contemporary large U.S. city. Further features added concern the possibility to include random noise, and the addition of a number of new outcome measures tuned to highlight macro-level implications of the segregation dynamics for different groups in the agent society.

In SegregationDiscreteChoice, we further modify the model incorporating in particular three new features: 1) heterogeneous preferences roughly based on empirical research categorizing agents into low, medium, and highly tolerant within each of the ethnic subgroups of the population, 2) we drop global thresholds (%-similar-wanted) and introduce instead a continuous individual-level single-peaked preference function for agents’ ideal neighborhood composition, and 3) we use a discrete choice model according to which agents probabilistically decide whether to move to a vacant spot or stay in the current spot by comparing the attractiveness of both locations based on the individual preference functions.

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This is an agent-based model that captures the dynamic processes related to moving from an educational system where the school a student attends is based on assignment to a neighborhood school, to one that gives households more choice among existing and newly formed public schools.

A system that receives from an agent-based social simulation the agent’s emotional data, their emotional-related data such as motivations and beliefs, as well as their location, and visualizes of all this information in a two dimensional map of the geographic region the agents inhabit as well as on graphs along the time dimension.

The model analyzes the economic and ecological effects of a provision of livestock drought insurance for dryland pastoralists. More precisely, it yields qualitative insights into how long-term herd and pasture dynamics change through insurance.