SySc 525 Agent Based Simulation

Introduction to simulation methods that impart simple rules to collections of "agents" that interact within an environment represented as a spatial grid. The properties of the agents and the environment vary dynamically, and often result in behavior patterns that are complex in ways that are not readily apparent from an examination of the rules that generated the behavior. Such behavior is often referred to as emergent, with examples including flocks of birds, traffic jams, ant colonies, crowd phenomena, etc. Of particular interest is the fact that such phenomena occur without centralized control. This approach is often used to study social systems, but may be used to study a variety of natural and non-natural systems.