Model to Model (M2M) Workshop

• What was it about?
• The Papers
• Comments, pictures etc.
  
• Publication
• Organisation
• The Next M2M: M2M2
  

What was M2M all about?

The aim of this workshop is to gather researchers in MABS who are interested in understanding and furthering the transferability of knowledge between models and beyond. Although models tend to give very seductive results, it is not always clear how people who are not the modeller can interpret or utilise such results - particularly when building their own models.

Understanding complex systems often seems to necessitate the use of more than one model. This might be for several different reasons, for example: different models at varying levels of abstraction might be used for different purposes. By specifically comparing models a better view of what modelling brings to the understanding of (real and artificial) societies may be facilitated.

Comparison of models can be achieved by diverse means that have been commonly used by researchers to attain validation or to get a better understanding of others' work, for example:

• Rewriting models that others have described in papers so as to understand them more deeply and reproduce the stated results (Axelrod, 1997);
• Composition of models where different scales are inter-related in a larger model – the results of one model being used in the other;
• Comparison of different models that announce the same type of results and trying to see if they actually produce similar (or the same) results - sometimes termed "aligning" of models (Axtell et al., 1996);
• Comparison of different models based on their fitness to a set of data;
• Using one model as a post-hoc summary or abstraction of another model's results; Constraining the scope of an existing model to enable more powerful techniques to be applied in a different computational framework;
• Using models with different structures and assumptions to confirm each other's results;
• Determining what to do when two models give results that contradict each other.

References

• Axelrod R., 1997, Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences, R. Conte and R. Hegselmann and P. Terna (eds) Simulating Social Phenomena, Springer-Verlag. Selected Papers TBA, Berlin, pp 21-40.
• Axtell, R., Axelrod R., J.M. Epstein and M.D. Cohen (1996), "Aligning Simulation Models: A Case Study and Results", Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory 1(2), pp. 123-141.
• Moss S., 2000, Canonical Task Environments for Social Simulation, Computational and Mathematical Organisation Theory, Vol. 6, No. 3, September 2000, pp 249-275.

Presented papers (List of Abstracts)

Comments, Pictures etc.

Publication:

Organisation committee:

• Juliette Rouchier (GREQAM-CNRS, Marseille, France)
• David Hales (Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester, UK)
• Bruce Edmonds (Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester, UK)

Program committee:

Rob Axtell, Francois Bousquet, Edmund Chattoe, Paul Davidsson, Marco Janssen, Catholijn Jonker, Christophe Lepage, Scott Moss, and Mario Paolucci.

Additional reviewers

Frederic Amblard, Nick Gotts, Bill McKelvey, Luis Antunes, Olivier Barreteau, Matt Hare.

The Next M2M Workshop

• A second M2M workshop is planned, provisionally entitled "M2M2".