The culture and manufacturing of the cotton fabric used to make your Jeans’ may have implied the use of fertilizers or pesticides polluting a water basin, have led to relocating people and even of children labour at different stages of its fabrication. As a consumer you probably didn’t take all these consequences into account (for your sake most of the information is not available, or value-wis...

This paper presents a prototype implementation of an intelligent assistance architecture for data-driven simulation specialising in qualitative data in the social sciences. The assistant architecture semi-automates an iterative sequence in which an initial simulation is interpreted and compared with real-world observations. The simulation is then adapted so that it more closely fits the observa...

Traditional (i.e. analytical) modelling practices in the social sciences rely on a very well established, although implicit, methodological protocol, both with respect to the way models are presented and to the kinds of analysis that are performed. Unfortunately, computer-simulated models often lack such a reference to an accepted methodological standard. This is one of the main reasons for the...

effective at achieving their goals—in fact, some have the opposite effect. Word-of-mouth communication—the informal channels of daily interactions among friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances—plays a much more significant role in how consumer behavior is shaped, fashion is introduced, and product reputation is built. Macrolevel simulations that include this kind of social p...

In agent-based social simulation, crowd models are used to generate agent behaviors that should correspond closely to human crowds. Despite significant progress in this area, many existing crowd models do not yet account for important cultural factors in crowd behavior, and even more so, for mixed-culture crowds. Moreover, evaluation of crowd models accounting for culture is particularly diffic...

The terms ‘verification’ and ‘validation’ are widely used both in the natural and the social sciences. They are extensively used in simulation, and are often associated with the need to evaluate models at different stages of the simulation development process. Frequently, terminological ambiguities arise when researchers conflate, along the simulation development process, the technical meanings...

This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws ...

For Archer, everyday life is shaped, in part, by the interplay of social and cultural systems [2]. A Social System is an array of positions, occupied by persons, and a distribution of status (or ranking) over that array. A Cultural System is conceived as a collection of belief-informing propositions. A Socio-Cultural System is Archer’s abstraction from everyday life and is analyzable as the int...

In this paper we will rst discuss computer simulations of social processes as models of qualitative understanding. In the second part of the paper we will present the cellular automata model of dynamic social impact (Nowak et al. 1990) and its applications in the areas of the formation of public opinion and social change as an example of a model of qualitative understanding. As computer simulat...

Pedestrian crowd simulation explores crowd behaviors in virtual environments. It is extensively studied in many areas, such as safety and civil engineering, transportation, social science, entertainment industry and so on. As a common phenomenon in pedestrian crowds, grouping can play important roles in crowd behaviors. To achieve more realistic simulations, it is important to support group mod...