Introduction
The coming together of agent-based s
imulation technology and
computational social simulation over the last decade has started to
produce results. The recent formations of
NAACSOS (North
American Association for Computational Organisational and Social
Science) in the US and
ESSA
(European Social Simulation Association) in Europe are testaments to
this fact. The results are in the form of useful applications of
agent-based social simulation to organisational and other social
issues, for example in the
FIRMA
project. However much of this work has not reached the wider
simulation community. This Special Issue of
SIMULATION aims to help rectify
this, providing a showcase for such applications.
The topic
An agent-based social simulation is: where actors in a social or
organisational domain are represented explicitly by entities with
(complex) mental properties (i.e. their internal information processing
capabilities) and modes of interaction between them, so that these
entities and their interactions are meaningfully interpretable as the
cognition and actions of those actors. This approach allows for a
more direct and descriptive approach to social simulation so that the
content and design of simulations are easier to criticise and correct
by both
experts and stakeholders. The relative disagregation of such
simulations allows
for the testing of assumptions used in more traditional statistical (or
other
aggregate) modelling.
Many of the well-known social
simulations are very abstract (e.g. Axtell and Epstein's Sugarscape) and are perhaps closer
to an analogy to help think about
social processes rather than attempting to represent observed social
systems. In this special issue we aim to address the other end of
the spectrum, by focusing on more applied simulations that seek to
represent social phenomena in a more direct way. Such applied
agent-based social simulation has started to appear in a number of
fields including: environmental management; land-use studies; traffic
management; crowd control; and urban settlement patterns.
Thus we will solicit papers that meet the following criteria:
- That report upon an agent-based simulation and its results (it
has to be working)
- That are applied to a specific social or organisational problem
- That does so in a way that is (or would be) credible to domain
experts or involved stakeholders
- And are broadly consistent with known data about the target domain
Issues that are important to explicate include:
- How was the internal structure (e.g. mental properties) of the
represented actors and their interaction modelled and explained to the
reader (especially for broader simulation community)?
- How was validation of the simulation
attempted?
- In what way was this approach useful?
- What did agent-based simulation do that other kinds of simulation
could not?
- How was the simulation used?
- In what ways was the approach taken different and similar to
other approaches?
The submitted papers should be
accessible to the broad range of Simulation readers, so that any
special issues, methods or technologies that are particular to
agent-based social simulation or the chosen application domain need to
be clearly explained.
Instructions for manuscript preparation
For manuscript formatting and other guidelines, please visit the
Author Guidelines
for SIMULATION
page.
Note: Manuscripts must not have been previously
published or be submitted for publication
elsewhere. Each submitted manuscript must include title, names,
authors'
affiliations, postal and e-mail addresses, an abstract, and a list of
keywords.
For multiple author submission, please identify the corresponding
author.
Submissions should include a cover letter confirming that the
submission
represents an original paper that has not be submitted or published
elsewhere.
Deadlines
| Full paper submission |
February 29, 2004
|
| Reviews sent |
April 30, 2004
|
| Final version of manuscripts |
June 30, 2004
|
| Expected date of publication |
November 2004
|
Submissions for full paper review
Manuscripts should be prepared and submitted using the online
manuscript submission system at http://simulation.manuscriptcentral.com/
according to the author guidelines for SIMULATION but it is important
that you also email Michael
Möhring at moeh@uni-koblenz.de
and inform him that you have done this giving him the paper number that
is allocated to you by the submission system.
Final paper submissions
Each final submission must be prepared based on the Simulation
journal requirements (see the Author Guidelines
for SIMULATION
page)
For questions contact either of the editors at: