Reviewing agent-based modelling of socio-ecosystems: a methodology for the analysis of climate change adaptation and sustainability

The integrated - environmental, economic and social - analysis of climate change calls for a paradigm shift as it is fundamentally a problem of complex, bottom-up and multi-agent human behaviour. There is a growing awareness that global environmental change dynamics and the related socio-economic implications involve a degree of complexity that requires an innovative modelling of combined social and ecological systems. Climate change policy can no longer be addressed separately from a broader context of adaptation and sustainability strategies. A vast body of literature on agent-based modelling (ABM) shows its potential to couple social and environmental models, to incorporate the influence of micro-level decision making in the system dynamics and to study the emergence of collective responses to policies. However, there are few publications which concretely apply this methodology to the study of climate change related issues. The analysis of the state of the art reported in this paper supports the idea that today ABM is an appropriate methodology for the bottom-up exploration of climate policies, especially because it can take into account adaptive behaviour and heterogeneity of the system's components.Review, Agent-Based Modelling, Socio-Ecosystems, Climate Change, Adaptation, Complexity.

Human, Not Humanoid, Robots

Robots that resemble human beings can be useful artefacts (humanoid robots) or they can be a new way of expressing scientific theories about human beings and human societies (human robots), and while humanoid robots must necessarily be physically realized, human robots may be just simulated in a computer. If the simulated robots do everything that human beings do, the theory which has been used to construct the robots explains human behaviour and human societies. This chapter is dedicated to human robots and it describes a number of individual and social human phenomena that have already been replicated by constructing simulated human robots and simulated robotic societies. At the end of the chapter, we briefly discuss some of the problems that human robots will pose to human beings

Reviewing agent-based modelling of socio-ecosystems: a methodology for the analysis of climate change adaptation and sustainability

Working Papers Department of Economics Ca’ Foscari University of Venic

Foundations of Trusted Autonomy

Trusted Autonomy; Automation Technology; Autonomous Systems; Self-Governance; Trusted Autonomous Systems; Design of Algorithms and Methodologie

Individual Versus Social Survival Strategies

The paper introduces the concepts of individual survival strategies (ISS) and social survival strategies (SSS) and presents three sets of simulations of a particular type of SSS: the Central Store (CS) strategy, according to which the individuals in a group contribute part of their resources to a central mechanism that can redistribute these resources or make other uses of them. CS and ISS both allow a group of individuals to survive in a favourable environment although group size is slower to reach a steady state in the CS group because of the lower selective pressure on individuals' resource production. However, only CS groups survive in a less favourable environment apparently because the CS functions as a safety net for the individuals in the group. Although CS strategies can have this and other advantages over ISS, if individuals are left free to decide whether or not to give their resources to the CS, they tend not to do so. In other words, they abandon the CS strategy and revert to ISS. Because CS strategies characterize an increasing number of human societies since Neolithic times an important research problem is to identify and reproduce in the simulations, how groups of individuals that tend to act egoistically and not to give their resources to the CS, can be induced to do so.Artificial Life, Social Survival Strategies, Centralized Resources