Non-traditional tools and mediums can provide unique methodological and interpretive opportunities for archaeologists. In this case, the Unreal Engine (UE), which is typically used for games and media, has provided a powerful tool for non-programmers to engage with 3D visualization and programming as never before. UE has a low cost of entry for researchers as it is free to download and has user-friendly “blueprint” tools that are visual and easily extendable. Traditional maritime mobility in the Salish Sea is examined using an agent-based model developed in blueprints. Focusing on the sea canoe travel of the Straits Salish northwestern Washington State and southwest British Columbia. This simulation integrates GIS data to assess travel time between Coast Salish archaeological village locations and archaeologically represented resource gathering areas. Transportation speeds informed by ethnographic data were used to examine travel times for short forays and longer inter-village journeys. The results found that short forays tended to half day to full day trips when accounting for resource gathering activities. Similarly, many locations in the Salish Sea were accessible in long journeys within two to three days, assuming fair travel conditions. While overall transportation costs to reach sites may be low, models such as these highlight the variability in transport risk and cost. The integration of these types of tools, traditionally used for entertainment, can increase the accessibility of modeling approaches to researchers, be expanded to digital storytelling, including aiding in the teaching of traditional ecological knowledge and placenames, and can have wide applications beyond maritime archaeology.

This is v0.01 of a UE5.2.1 agent based model.

This software simulates cars and bicycles as traffic participants while crossing different crossroad designs such as roundabouts, protected crossroads and standard crossroads. It is written in Netlogo 6.2 and aims to identify safety characteristics of these layouts using agent-based modeling. Participants track the line of sight to each other and print them as an output alongside with the adjacent destination, used layout, count of collisions/cars/bicycles and time.

Detailed information can be found within the info tab of the program itself.

This model examines the potential impact of market collapse on the economy and demography of fishing households in the Logone Floodplain, Cameroon.

The purpose of the simulation was to explore and better understand the process of bridging between an analysis of qualitative data and the specification of a simulation. This may be developed for more serious processes later but at the moment it is merely an illustration.
This exercise was done by Stephanie Dornschneider (School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin) and Bruce Edmonds to inform the discussion at the Lorentz workshop on “Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Data using Social Simulation” at Leiden in April 2019. The qualitative data was collected and analysed by SD. The model specification was developed as the result of discussion by BE & SD. The model was programmed by BE. This is described in a paper submitted to Social Simulation 2019 and (to some extent) in the slides presented at the workshop.

Its a multi agent simulation environment, provided using JADE/Java. It gets the number of agents and tasks, then divides the physical environment to some segments, and then runs a greedy capability-based coalition formation and task allocation algorithm to assign tasks to groups of agents and complete the tasks.

The agent based model matches origins and destinations using employment search methods at the individual level.

B3GET simulates populations of virtual organisms evolving over generations, whose evolutionary outcomes reflect the selection pressures of their environment. The model simulates several factors considered important in biology, including life history trade-offs, investment in fighting ability and aggression, sperm competition, infanticide, and competition over access to food and mates. Downloaded materials include starting genotype and population files. Edit the these files and see what changes occur in the behavior of virtual populations!

View the B3GET user manual here.

This is a Netlogo model which simulates car and bus/tram traffic in Augsburg, specifically between the districts Stadtbergen, Göggingen and the Königsplatz. People either use their cars or public transport to travel to one of their random destinations (Stadtbergen or Göggingen), performing some activity and then returning to their home. Attributes such as travel and waiting time as well as their happiness upon arriving are stored and have an impact on individuals on whether they would consider changing their mode of transport or not.

This model simulates the mechanisms of evolution, or how allele frequencies change in a population over time.

The purpose of this study is another agent-based replication of a System Dynamics model (Anderson,1973) where he analysed the dynamics of nutrient, biomass, oxygen and detritus in a model lake under conditions of artificial fertilising and policies to deal with the consequences of artificial fertilising.. A first replication (Möhring & Troitzsch,2001) added those agents to the original model that were necessary to move the role of the experimenter into the model, whereas this replication replaces the original lake with a collection of small elements between which biomass, nurtrents and oxygen are exchanged, adds rivers upstream and downstream as well as adjacent land divided into villages and populated with farms and industrial plants run by individual persons.