Please consider taking my ABM class in the Spring 2016 Semester
What is ABM?
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a growing technology that is finding application
in many areas from environmental chemistry to microbial ecology to
transportation engineering to social sciences and business. It is a
"systems" or "bottom-up" approach for understanding how
complex systems behave. Individual low-level elements of the system (e.g.
bacteria, cars) are simulated and the system-level behavior (e.g. population
density, traffic congestion) emerges as a result of the cumulative action and
interaction of these low-level entities. This is different from the traditional
"top-down" approach where system-level state variables are modified
directly using differential equations.
Course overview. The course is geared towards a multi-disciplinary audience, and open to
students from engineering, environmental science, biology and chemistry,
sociology, business and others. Topics include introduction and motivation of
ABM, basic principles, comparison to other methods (e.g. cellular automata,
individual-based modeling), available software, computational strategies (e.g.
up-scaling, agent accounting), model development, model calibration and
testing, and model application. A number
of case studies from the literature in various disciplines will be reviewed and
discussed. A major part of the course will be a hands-on term project. Students
are encouraged to explore the use of ABM for their own research interests for
the term project. The project will be implemented using the NetLogo ABM
framework. NetLogo models can be served as Java Applets on the Internet and the
students will be required to submit their final papers as web pages, which will
be published on the course web page. The text will be "Agent-based and
Individual-based Modeling: A Practical Introduction" by Grimm and
Railsback (2011).
