Agent-based Modelling with Netlogo

BeginnersNew

This module is part of the Social Science Research Methods Centre training programme which is a shared platform for providing research students with a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research methods skills that are relevant across the social sciences.

Societies can be viewed as path-dependent dynamical systems in which the interactions between multiple heterogeneous actors, and the institutions and organisations they create, lead to complex overlapping patterns of change over different space and time-scales. Agent-based models are exploratory tools for trying to understand some of this complexity. They use computational methods to represent individual people, households, organisations, or other types of agent, and help to make explicit the potential consequences of hypotheses about the way people act, interact and engage with their environment. These types of models have been used in fields as diverse as Architecture, Archaeology, Criminology, Economics, Epidemiology, Geography, and Sociology, covering all kinds of topics including social networks and formation of social norms, spatial distribution of criminal activity, spread of disease, issues in health and welfare, warfare and disasters, behaviour in stock-markets, land-use change, farming,forestry, fisheries, traffic flow, planning and development of cities, flooding and water management. This course introduces a popular freely available software tool, Netlogo, which is accessible to those with no initial programming experience, and shows how to use it to develop a variety of simple models so that students would be able to see how it might apply to their own research.

• Mphil and PhD students from participating departments taking the Social Science Research Methods Centre training programme as part of their research degree

• You must have joined the Moodle course page for this module http://www.ssrmc.group.cam.ac.uk/ssrmc-modules/moodle

Number of sessions: 2

• Introduction to simulation in social systems; concepts involved in writing computer programs; outline of Netlogo and its capabilities; the user interface, documentation, adding buttons, patches and agents; using example code.
• Following from session one, a set of examples will illustrate the techniques needed to make practical working programs, including illustrations of : Cellular automata; system dynamics; networks; gis; land use change.

Presentation and practicals

• To gain maximum benefits from the course it is important that students do not see this course in isolation from the other MPhil courses or research training they are taking.
• Responsibility lies with each student to consider the potential for their own research using methods common in fields of the social sciences that may seem remote. Ideally this task will be facilitated by integration of the SSRMC with discipline-specific courses in their departments and through reading and discussion.

Two sessions of four hours each; eight hours in total

Once a week for two weeks