On the Use of Agent-Based Models as Teaching Tools and Their Impact on the Characterization of Student-System Interaction

As the study of complex systems expands, new frameworks in which methodologies from different sciences may collaborate more naturally are needed. This work presents the utilization of agent-based models as a core tool for a research project in which the principalobjective is to characterize high-school students’ performance while facing different representations of complex systems. It is described how the agent-based model helped with the communication between educational science and computer science researchers involved in the project. Also, a new educational research perspective consisting of students’ data collection is shown in this work. This new perspective intends to support qualitative analysesof educational methodologies with quantitative visualizations resulting of learning processes.Keywords: agent-based models, complexity, education, interactions, dat

Traffic Games: Modeling Freeway Traffic with Game Theory.

We apply game theory to a vehicular traffic model to study the effect of driver strategies on traffic flow. The resulting model inherits the realistic dynamics achieved by a two-lane traffic model and aims to incorporate phenomena caused by driver-driver interactions. To achieve this goal, a game-theoretic description of driver interaction was developed. This game-theoretic formalization allows one to model different lane-changing behaviors and to keep track of mobility performance. We simulate the evolution of cooperation, traffic flow, and mobility performance for different modeled behaviors. The analysis of these results indicates a mobility optimization process achieved by drivers' interactions