WEDNESDAY May 21

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.

“Using HPC with ABMs” will cover how we got NetLogo working on UK national high-performance computing infrastructureand 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 follow-on activities to make HPC easier for the social simulation community.

Modeling transhumance in the Sahel: between mathematics and social sciences