This contribution deals with the assessment of the quality of a simulation by discussing and comparing "real-world" and scientific social simulations. We use the example of the Caffè Nero in Guildford as a 'real-world' simulation of a Venetian café. The construction of everyday simulations...

This paper draws on the metaphor of a spectrum of models ranging from the most theory-driven to the most evidence-driven. The issue of concern is the practice and criteria that will be appro- priate to validation of different models. In order to address this concern, two modelling approaches are...

Socionics is an interdisciplinary approach with the objective to use sociological knowledge about the structures, mechanisms and processes of social interaction and social communication as a source of inspiration for the development of multi-agent systems, both for the purposes of engineering...

In this paper we present a first attempt to represent the social behavior of actors in a resource sharing context in such a way that different forms of solidarity can be detected and measured. We expect that constructing agent-based models of water-related interactions at the interface of urban...

The particle swarm algorithm uses principles derived from social psychology to find optimal points in a search space. The present paper decomposes and reinterprets the particle swarm in order to discover new ways of implementing the algorithm. Some essential characteristics of the method are...

This paper presents the analysis of a dataset of publications in economics that makes use of simulations. Data areas explored in order to obtain information about diffusion of simulation techniques in time and across sub-disciplines. Moreover, following Robert Axelrod\'s concerns about the...

The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework describing the internal organization of communities of practice in a dynamic perspective. More precisely, we argue that communities of practice adopt some specific patterns of internal organization where some of their members obtain a...

The robustness of outcomes to the parameterization of behavioral rules is a crucial property of any model aimed at simulating complex human systems. Schelling model of residential segregation satisfies this criterion. Based on the recently available high-resolution census GIS, we apply Schelling...

The work aims to investigate a paradigm of instability in coalition forming among countries, using a model inspired from Statistical Physics. The instability is a consequence of decentralized maximization of the individual benefits where contradictory associations into coalitions occur due to...

When talking to fellow modellers about the feedback we get on our simulation models the conversation quickly shifts to anecdotes of rejective scepticism. Many of us experience that they get only few remarks, and especially only little helpful constructive feedback on their simulation models. In...