Tuesday, May 26, 2015

A Semester with Spatial Agent-based Models

With the spring semester over, I thought I would show some of the final agent-based modeling projects that were carried out in CSS 645: Spatial Agent-based Models of Human-Environment Interactions. As always I was quite impressed the models and we had a plethora of topics ranging from mobile agent-based models, shopping, pick pocketing, route finding, travel to work, the spatial spread of information, deer management, urban growth etc... What is interesting is that while the majority of models are implemented in NetLogo, more and more are being done in Python.


Something new for this semester is we also tried to reproduce a published model. Below you can see 3 examples of such work. Click here to see a previous post on reproduction and replication. 

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Interesting diversity in models has emerged during the course. Could you tell a few words more on the models developed using Python? What tools are being used? Why these? For what models is it especially suitable? Is there source code available?

In the video, all except the second one seem to be netlogo, the second one is different, but the interface doesn't give me any clues...

Thanks in advance,
Erwin

Andrew Crooks said...

Good question, apart from the land use model in the movie, the other python models had no nice GUI (hence no movies). They tended to focus on more social network analysis problems and then platted the results over maps or as graphs.

Looking around, the students use a variety of python packages including pandas, arcpy, matplotlib. Unfortunately the source code is not available. In the sense, non have posted it online. If they do, I will make sure to add a follow up comment.

Unknown said...

Thanks for this additional explanation.