During the last thirty years education researchers have developed models for judging the comparative performance of schools, in studies of what has become known as “differential school effectivenessâ€. A great deal of empirical research has been carried out to understand why differences...

This paper presents a model to generate dynamic patterns of maritime piracy. Model details, outputs and calibration are illustrated. The model presented here is a tool to estimate the number of pirates and their area of action. The Gulf of Aden is considered as a case study, and data on pirate...

When designing an agent-based simulation, an important question to answer is how to model the decision making processes of the agents in the system. A large number of agent decision making models can be found in the literature, each inspired by different aims and research questions. In this...

The NewTies project is implementing a simulation in which societies of agents are expected to de-velop autonomously as a result of individual, population and social learning. These societies are expected to be able to solve environmental challenges by acting collectively. The challenges are...

This contribution deals with the assessment of the quality of a simulation by discussing and comparing "real-world" and scientific social simulations. We use the example of the Caffè Nero in Guildford as a 'real-world' simulation of a Venetian café. The construction of everyday simulations...

A multi-agent simulation embodying a theory of innovation networks has been built and used to suggest a number of policy-relevant conclusions. The simulation animates a model of innovation (the successful exploitation of new ideas) and this model is briefly described. Agents in the model...

None of the standard network models fit well with sociological observations of real social networks. This paper presents a simple structure for use in agent-based models of large social networks. Taking the idea of social circles, it incorporates key aspects of large social networks such as low...

It is becoming widely accepted that applied social simulation research is more effective if potential users and stakeholders are closely involved in model specification, design, testing and use, using the principles of participatory research. In this paper, a review of software engineering...

A package of Lisp functions is described which implements a simple multi-level simulation toolkit, MLS. Its design owes a great deal to MIMOSE. MLS runs within Lisp-Stat. It offers a set of functions, macros and objects designed to make the specification of multi-level models straightforward and...

Science is the result of a substantially social process. That is, science relies on many inter-personal processes, including: selection and communication of research findings, discussion of method, checking and judgement of others' research, development of norms of scientific behaviour,...