Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) is a class of computational models for
simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents with the goal of assessing
their effects on a system as a whole. Several frameworks for generating parallel ABMS
applications have been developed taking advantage of their common characteristics,
but there is a lack of a general benchmark for comparing the performance of generated
applications. We propose and design a benchmark that takes into consideration the
…

Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) is a class of computational models for
simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents with the goal of assessing
their effects on a system as a whole. Several frameworks for generating parallel ABMS
applications have been developed taking advantage of their common characteristics,
but there is a lack of a general benchmark for comparing the performance of generated
applications. We propose and design a benchmark that takes into consideration the
…

“Food for all” (FFD) is an agent-based model designed to study the evolution of cooperation for food storage. Households face the social dilemma of whether to store food in a corporate stock or to keep it in a private stock.

We model the relationship between natural resource user´s individual time preferences and their use of destructive extraction method in the context of small-scale fisheries.

This model inspects the performance of firms as the product attribute space changes, which evolves as a consequence of firms’ actions. Firms may create new product variants by dragging demand from other existing variants. Firms decide whether to open new product variants, to invade existing ones, or to keep their variant portfolio. At each variant there is a Cournot competition each round. Competition is nested since many firms compete at many variants simultaneously, affecting firm composition at each location (variant).

After the Cournot outcomes, at each round firms decide whether to (i) keep their existing product variant niche, (ii) invade an existing variant, (iii) create a new variant, or (iv) abandon a variant. Firms’ profits across their niche take into consideration the niche-width cost and the cost of opening a new variant.

The agent based model matches origins and destinations using employment search methods at the individual level.

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.

Industrial clustering patterns are the result of an entrepreneurial process where spinoffs inherit the ideas and attributes of their parent firms. This computational model maps these patterns using abstract methodologies.

PSoup is an educational program in which evolution is demonstrated, on the desk-top, as you watch. Blind bugs evolve sophisticated heuristic search algorithms to be the best at finding food fast.

The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain formed an important habitat exploited by Pleistocene hunter-gatherer populations during periods of lower sea level. This productive, grassy habitat would have supported numerous large-bodied ungulates accessible to a population of skilled hunters with the right hunting technology. It also provided a potentially rich location for plant food collection, and along its shores a coastline that moved with the rise and fall of sea levels. The rich archaeological and paleontological records of Pleistocene sites along the modern Cape south coast of South Africa, which would have overlooked the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain during Pleistocene times of lower sea level, provides a paleoarchive of this extinct ecosystem. In this paper, we present a first order illustration of the “palaeoscape modeling” approach advocated by Marean et al. (2015). We use a resourcescape model created from modern studies of habitat productivity without the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain. This is equivalent to predominant Holocene conditions. We then run an agent-based model of the human foraging system to investigate several research questions. Our agent-based approach uses the theoretical framework of optimal foraging theory to model human foraging decisions designed to optimize the net caloric gains within a complex landscape of spatially and temporally variable resources. We find that during the high sea-levels of MIS 5e (+5-6 m asl) and the Holocene, the absence of the Plain left a relatively poor food base supporting a much smaller population relying heavily on edible plant resources from the current Cape flora. Despite high species diversity of plants with edible storage organs, and marine invertebrates, encounter rates with highly profitable resources were low. We demonstrate that without the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain, human populations must have been small and low density, and exploited plant, mammal, and marine resources with relatively low caloric returns. The exposure and contraction of the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain was likely the single biggest driver of behavioral change during periods of climate change through the Pleistocene and into the transition to the Holocene.