ESSA@work is open to all interested modelers at any career stage. The only (and key!) requirement is to have a work-in-progress model on which you would like expert and peer feedback. Models can be at any stage of development. Those in the early stages of development (e.g., at the design stage) should still have a clear description of the purpose, scope, structure and logic of the model.

The modelling experts that provided feedback on the proposed projects were Bruce Edmonds (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Cristina Chueca Del Cerro (Durham University).

Various disciplines follow an incremental approach, meaning that it is common to produce multiple publications on the same model, each time adding a small but substantial contribution. In social simulations, however, while publications do influence each other, this incremental approach is relatively uncommon. Instead, most researchers, after publishing an article, tend to move on to developing an entirely new model.

In this session, we will discuss this topic, exploring questions such as:

• Why are social simulations not typically incremental?
• Is this a problem, or is it simply a characteristic of social simulations?
• How does the non-incremental nature of social simulations affect the comparison of models on the same topic?
• Is it currently feasible to develop research in a more incremental way?
• What changes could encourage the field to adopt a more incremental approach?

All participants will have the opportunity to share their ideas, experiences, and opinions on these topics.

The European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and Computational Social Simulation Society of the Americas (CSSSA) are separated by time-zones and the Atlantic Ocean, however certain sections of their membership and certainly large parts of their interests have historically overlapped. After a few recent years apart, the management groups of our respective organisations would like to re-kindle our relationship in recognition of the potential strength and progress that might be made by creating closer ties across continents. But what exactly do each of our respective organisations do and what can we learn from one another?
In this facilitated, interactive session, we will be inviting some of the historians of ESSA and CSSSA to talk about our current activities as well as walk through the history and milestones of each organisation, highlighting seminal people, papers, events, and themes that have shaped their existence. We will also call on management committee members and session participants to test their knowledge of the social simulation literature and community through a series of on-line quizzes as a means of finding out a little more about one another.
We will finish the session with a summary of ‘where-to next’ for the relationship between CSSSA and ESSA, highlighting some exciting, planned exchanges of people and information that we hope everyone can look forward to in the coming years.

The approach of using qualitative data to inform social simulation design (Qual2Rule) has been around for 20 years, with an increasing number of papers at the Social Simulation conference broadly adopting this. However, the road ahead for Qual2Rule – how to progress further is unclear. This session will be a chance for a broad range of researchers to suggest future directions for development, which will inform the agenda for the next 10 years.

The session will be structured as a general discussion, but structured around a series of questions, addressed one at a time. These are:

(1) What has and has not been achieved by Qual2Rule so far? (2) What aspects of the Qual2Rule are the most useful?

(3) Which aspects of Qual2Rule most need further development?

(4) What other approaches could Qual2Rule be most productively linked to?

(5) Are there any grand challenges that the Qual2Rule community might tackle to comprehensively demonstrate it

(6) What (as a community) practical steps should we be taking to consolidate and further develop Qual2Rule?

The session will end with a summary and asking for those interested in a follow-up workshop to establish an agenda for the next decade.

The workshop titled ‘Approaches to Modelling Deep Structural Change’ explores how social simulation and, in particular, agent-based models can represent ontological change—the emergence, disappearance, or transformation of entities, relationships, and structures—during transformative change. With the current world-wide trends, e.g., on climate change or in demographics, there is an increasing need to understand these phenomenon and how to approach them with the help of social simulation.

Moving beyond static ontologies, we will discuss what concepts related to deep structural change we observe and how models can incorporate adaptive ontologies or generative mechanisms to capture deep structural shifts. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the discussion on challenges we face when trying to model these deep changes and what practices are currently used to overcome these.

For this, we would encourage participants to submit a brief description of their cases/experiences with modeling deep structural change beforehand. Depending on the responses, we would love to encourage participants to pitch or work with their “deep structural change case.” Building on this input and through structured ideation and discussion, participants will explore diverse approaches to modeling such changes, using their own case or a case study of significant technological or environmental transitions as a starting point. Furthermore, this workshop serves as a starting point for hopefully a wider discussion within the ESSA community on how to model transformative change.

This session will cover how we got NetLogo working on UK national high-performance computing infrastructure and discuss some activities we have undertaken to make using HPC from NetLogo easier in future and/or demonstrate the advantages of using HPC with our agent-based models. We will then provide an opportunity to join follow-on activities to make HPC easier for the social simulation community.

Presenter: Cheick Amed Diloma Gabriel Traore (Polytechnic School of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso)

Title: Modeling transhumance in the Sahel: between mathematics and social sciences