The objective of building a social simulation in the Populism and Civic Engagement (PaCE) project is to study the phenomenon of populism by mapping individual level political behaviour and explain the influence of agents on, and their interdependence with the respective political parties. Voters, political parties and – to some extent – the media can be viewed as forming a complex adaptive system, in which parties compete for citizens’ votes, voters decide on which party to vote for based on their respective positions with regard to particular issues, and the media may influence the salience of issues in the public debate.

This is the first version of a model exploring voting behaviour in Austria. It focusses on modelling the interaction of voters and parties in a political landscape; the effects of the media are not yet represented. Austria was chosen as a case study because it has an established populist party (the “Freedom Party” FPO), which has even been part of the government over the years.

This is a model of root disease spread between trees in the landscape. The disease spreads via two transmission processes: (a) root contact/root graft transmission between adjacent trees and (b) insect vectors that carry spores between trees. Full details can be found in the “Info” tab in the model and in the readme file in the GitHub repository.

The spatially-explicit AgriculTuralLandscApe Simulator (ATLAS) simulates realistic spatial-temporal crop availability at the landscape scale through crop rotations and crop phenology.

This is a simplified version of a Complex Model of Voter Turnout by Edmonds et al.(2014). It was developed to better understand the mechanisms at play on that complex model.

This model represents technological and ecological behaviors of mobile hunter-gatherers, in a variable environment, as they produce, use, and discard chipped stone artifacts. The results can be analyzed and compared with archaeological sites.

This model system aims to simulate the whole process of task allocation, task execution and evaluation in the team system through a feasible method. On the basis of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory and Agent-based Modelling (ABM) technologies and tools, this simulation system attempts to abstract real-world teams into MAS models. The author designs various task allocation strategies according to different perspectives, and the interaction among members is concerned during the task-performing process. Additionally, knowledge can be acquired by such an interaction process if members encounter tasks they cannot handle directly. An artificial computational team is constructed through ABM in this simulation system, to replace real teams and carry out computational experiments. In all, this model system has great potential for studying team dynamics, and model explorers are encouraged to expand on this to develop richer models for research.

This is a replication model of the matching problem including the mate search problem, which is the generalization of a traditional optimization problem.

This is an agent-based model of the implementation of the self-enforcing agreement in cooperative teams.

This model simulates the spread of anti-vaccine sentiments in cyber and physical space and how it creates emergence of clusters of anti-vacciners, which eventually lead to higher probablity of disease outbreaks.

The DiDIY-Factory model is a model of an abstract factory. Its purpose is to investigate the impact Digital Do-It-Yourself (DiDIY) could have on the domain of work and organisation.

DiDIY can be defined as the set of all manufacturing activities (and mindsets) that are made possible by digital technologies. The availability and ease of use of digital technologies together with easily accessible shared knowledge may allow anyone to carry out activities that were previously only performed by experts and professionals. In the context of work and organisations, the DiDIY effect shakes organisational roles by such disintermediation of experts. It allows workers to overcome the traditionally strict organisational hierarchies by having direct access to relevant information, e.g. the status of machines via real-time information systems implemented in the factory.

A simulation model of this general scenario needs to represent a more or less abstract manufacturing firm with supervisors, workers, machines and tasks to be performed. Experiments with such a model can then be run to investigate the organisational structure –- changing from a strict hierarchy to a self-organised, seemingly anarchic organisation.