Examples on how to use them to analyse Complex Systems
This model demonstrates the relationship of people trying to sustain land as a natural resource of land over the course of time. In this simplified scenario, two types of developers exist: those who exercise recycling (“recyclers”) and those who don’t (“wasteful”). Recyclers are more conscious with regard to the use of land and they tend to recycle practically everything.. On the other hand, wasteful individuals tend to consume the whole patch of land and afterwards dump their waste on it making it unusable to anyone until it has been restored by a recycler.
While the model is unrealistic in many respects, it brings up very important issues regarding sustainability in land and natural resource usage. This model shows the energy and effort it takes to sustain an environment to make it continuously habitable for people. To maintain resources, a balance must be maintained between use and recycling/renewal. While recycling leads to a better environment overall, it comes at an additional cost, since it often means not exploiting resources to their fullest potential. In addition, the recycling effort requires energy consumption as well. Furthermore, a lot of effort is required to clean up the waste deposited by the wasteful individuals.
The application could serve as a good starting point for fruitful conversation and debate regarding, for example, how reasonable the different assumptions as well as the consequences of these assumptions. Thus, students make use of computational models to identify and test solutions.
Hofstede G.J., Chappin E. (2021) Archetypical Patterns in Agent-Based Models. In: Ahrweiler P., Neumann M. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. ESSA 2019. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61503-1_31<br />
