Self-adaptive systems are distributed computing systems that can adapt their behavior and structure to different kinds of conditions. This adaptation does not concern the single components only, but the entire system. In a previous work we have identified several patterns for self-adaptation, classifying them by means of a taxonomy, which aims at being a support for developers of self-adaptive ...

Flocks of brown-headed cowbirds, Molothrus ater, selforganize social environments, which have strong impacts on social learning and behavior. To understand the rules underlying self-organization of the social environment, I develop an agent-based model of cowbird social association and evolve it to match observed patterns of association measured from real birds. The behavioral rules evolved in ...

Public-private service networks (PPSN) consist of social and technology components. Development of PPSN is ill-understood as these are dependent on a complex mix of interactions among stakeholders and their technologies and is influenced by contemporary developments. The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of PPSN by modeling its evolution. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is used to un...

A continuum model for a population of self-propelled particles interacting through nematic alignment is derived from an individual-based model. The methodology consists of introducing a hydrodynamic scaling of the corresponding mean-field kinetic equation. The resulting perturbation problem is solved thanks to the concept of generalized collision invariants. It yields a hyperbolic but non-conse...

In this paper we discuss a scaling approach to business fluctuations. Our starting point consists in recognizing that concepts and methods derived from physics have allowed economists to (re)discover a set of stylized facts which have to be satisfactorily accounted for in their models. Standard macroeconomics, based on a reductionist approach centered on the representative agent, is definitely ...

This study extends previous research that showed how informal social sanctions can backfire when members prefer friendship over enforcement of group norms. We use a type of neural network to model the coordination of informal social control in a small group of adaptive agents confronted with a social dilemma. This model incorporates two mechanisms of social influence, informal sanctions and imi...

Cells of the immune system must search among billions of healthy cells in order to find and neutralize a small number of infected cells before pathogens replicate to sufficient numbers to cause disease or death. The immune system uses information signals to accomplish this search quickly. Here we use a computationally tractable and scalable differential equation model and a spatially explicit a...

Inspired by the chemotaxis interaction of living cells, we have developed an agent-based approach for self-organizing shape formation. Since all our simulations begin with a different uniform random configuration and our agents move stochastically, it has been observed that the self-organization process may form two or more stable final configurations. These differing configurations may be char...

Multi-sided platforms are increasingly common, which is no surprise given the winner-take-all dynamics in platform-based markets. That is, the platform with the biggest installed base of buyers and sellers can arguably sustain its competitive advantage because of positive indirect network effects. We reexamine this argument with an agent-based simulation model, where we allow for variety seekin...

We propose two agent-based models of group foraging for two perceptual conditions. These models exhibit complex group-level behavior using only a simple rule set with a homogeneous group of agents. The models are shown to replicate results from Goldstone and Ashpole (2004), and we describe a series of simulations that test the sources of the resource undermatching often found in group foraging ...