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Further Reading

Outside the social sciences, simulation has been an established methodology for
decades. Thus, there is a host of literature about model building in general. The
biggest simulation conference, the annual “Winter Simulation Conference”, always
includes introductory tutorials, some of which may be of interest to social scientists.
Good examples are Law (2008) and Shannon (1998).
For a comprehensive review of the currently existing general agent-based
simulation toolkits, see Nikolai and Madey (2009); other reviews focus on a smaller
selection of toolkits (e.g. Railsback et al. 2006; Tobias and Hofmann 2004; Gilbert
and Bankes 2002).
The chapters in this volume on checking your simulation model (Chap. 7, Galán
et al. 2017), documenting your model (Chap. 15, Grimm et al. 2017) and model
validation (Chap. 9, David et al. 2017) should be of particular interest for anyone
intending to follow the exploration and consolidation approach to model develop-
ment. However, if you would rather attempt a more formal approach to building
an agent-based simulation model, Chap. 6 (Siebers and Klügl 2017) discusses one
such approach in detail. You could also consult textbooks on methodologies for the
design of multi-agent systems, such as Luck et al. (2004) and Bergenti et al. (2004)
or Henderson-Sellers and Giorgini (2005). After all, any agent-based simulation
model can be seen as a special version of a multi-agent system.

References

Alam, S. J., Geller, A., Meyer, R., & Werth, B. (2010). Modelling contextualized reasoning in
complex societies with “Endorsements”. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation,
13(4), 6. http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/6.html
Bergenti, F., Gleizes, M.-P., & Zambonelli, F. (Eds.). (2004). Methodologies and software
engineering for agent systems: The agent-oriented software engineering handbook. Boston:
Kluwer Academic.
Cartwright, N. (1983). How the laws of physics lie. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
David, N., Fachada, N., & Rosa, A. C. (2017). Verifying and validating simulations.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-9_9.
Edmonds, B. (2017). Different modelling purposes. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-
9_4.
Epstein, J. M. (2008). Why model? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 11(4), 12.
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/4/12.html
Evans, A., Heppenstall, A., & Birkin, M. (2017). Understanding simulation results.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-9_10.
Galán, J. M., Izquierdo, L. R., Izquierdo, S. S., Santos, J. I., del Olmo, R., & López-
Paredes, A. (2017). Checking simulations: Detecting and avoiding errors and artefacts.
doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-9_7.
Gilbert, N., & Bankes, S. (2002). Platforms and methods for agent-based modelling. PNAS,
99(Suppl. 3), 7197–7198.