The Constitution of the United States empowers the Congress to pass copyright laws to promote knowledge creation in the society and more specifically scientific knowledge. Many interesting economic studies have been conducted on copyright law, but very little research has been done to study the...

Traffic signals and traffic flow models have been studied extensively in the past and have provided valuable insights on the design of signalling systems, congestion control, and punitive policies. This paper takes a slightly different tack and describes what happens at an intersection where the...

In this study we consider some of the philosophical issues that should be taken into account when simulating social behaviour. Even though the ideas presented here are philosophical, they should be of interest more to researchers simulating social behaviour than to philosophers, since we try to...

Although the majority of researchers interested in ABM increasingly agree that the most natural way to program their models is to adopt OO practices, UML diagrams are still largely absent from their publications. In the last 15 years, the use of UML has risen constantly, to the point where UML...

During the 1960s but mainly in the 1970s, large mathematical dynamic global models were implemented in computers to simulate the entire world, or large portions of it. Several different but interrelated subjects were considered simultaneously, and their variables evolved over time in an attempt...

Networks are very evident in the physical world and particularly in social structures. One focus of research is on investigating the development and maintenance of social network structures. Social networks may be typically categorised as random, scale-free or hierarchical structures. A key...

Knowledge diffusion models typically involve two main features: an underlying social network topology on one side, and a particular design of interaction rules driving knowledge transmission on the other side. Acknowledging the need for realistic topologies and adoption behaviors backed by...

There is growing interest in extending complex systems approaches to the social sciences. This is apparent in the increasingly widespread literature and journals that deal with the topic and is being facilitated by adoption of multi-agent simulation in research. Much of this research uses simple...

We report on research that is developing a simulation model for assessing systemic innovations, or 'transitions', of societal systems towards a more sustainable development. Our overall aim is to outline design principles for models that can offer new insights into tackling persistent problems...

There is empirical evidence from a range of disciplines that as the connectivity of a network increases, we observe an increase in the average fitness of the system. But at the same time, there is an increase in the proportion of failure/extinction events which are extremely large. The...