Sahelian transhumance is a seasonal pastoral mobility between the transhumant’s terroir of origin and one or more host terroirs. Sahelian transhumance can last several months and extend over hundreds of kilometers. Its purpose is to ensure efficient and inexpensive feeding of the herd’s ruminants. This paper describes an agent-based model to determine the spatio-temporal distribution of Sahelian transhumant herds and their impact on vegetation. Three scenarios based on different values of rainfall and the proportion of vegetation that can be grazed by transhumant herds are simulated. The results of the simulations show that the impact of Sahelian transhumant herds on vegetation is not significant and that rainfall does not impact the alley phase of transhumance. The beginning of the rainy season has a strong temporal impact on the spatial distribution of transhumant herds during the return phase of transhumance.

This model simulates the opinion dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination to examine especially how fears and cognitive bias contribute to the opinion polarisation and vaccination rate. In studying the opinion dynamics of COVID-19 vaccination, this model refers to the HUMAT framework (Antosz et al, 2019). Many psychological and social processes are included in the model, such as dynamical decision-making processes of information exchange and fear formation, satisfaction evaluation, preferred decision selection and dissonance reduction.

Manipulate[
Module[{fDot, mDot, poly, roots, stableRoots, rStar, rIso,
endPointStar, endPointIso},(1. Define the System Dynamics)
fDot = phi1(f/m) - phi2(m/f);
mDot = mu1(f/m) - mu2(m/f);
(*2. Find the Equilibrium Ratio r=f/
…

We built a model using R,polr package, to assess 55 published case studies from developing countries to determine what factors influence the level of compliance of local communities with protected area regulations.

Our model shows how disinformation spreads on a random network of individuals. The network is weighted and directed. We are looking at how different factors affect how fast, or how many people get “infected” with the misinformation. One of the main factors that we were curious about was perceived trustworthiness. This is because we want to see if people of power, or a high degree of perceived trustworthiness, were able to push misinformation to more people and convert more people to believe the information.

This model is an extended version of the original MERCURY model (https://www.comses.net/codebases/4347/releases/1.1.0/ ) . It allows for experiments to be performed in which empirically informed population sizes of sites are included, that allow for the scaling of the number of tableware traders with the population of settlements, and for hypothesised production centres of four tablewares to be used in experiments.

Experiments performed with this population extension and substantive interpretations derived from them are published in:

Hanson, J.W. & T. Brughmans. In press. Settlement scale and economic networks in the Roman Empire, in T. Brughmans & A.I. Wilson (ed.) Simulating Roman Economies. Theories, Methods and Computational Models. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

…

BEGET Classic includes previous versions used in the classroom and for publication. Please check out the latest version of B3GET here, which has several user-friendly features such as directly importing and exporting genotype and population files.

The classic versions of B3GET include: version one and version three were used in undergraduate labs at the University of Minnesota to demonstrate principles in primate behavioral ecology; version two first demonstrated proof of concept for creating virtual biological organisms using decision-vector algorithms; version four was presented at the 2017 annual meeting at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists; version five was presented in a 2019 publication from the Journal of Human Evolution (Crouse, Miller, and Wilson, 2019).

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 model demonstrates the spread of collapse through a network. The model is abstract but has many applications in various fields.

The model was built to study the links between consumer credit, wealth distribution and aggregate demand in a complex macroeconomics system.