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Benchmarks, aka Qualitative
Model Validation
This chapter contains some comments on the problem of
validating the computational model. This is one of the hardest
parts of the development of a simulator in general. Since in vivo
or in vitro experiments are money and time consuming, many
parameters are quite diffi cult, if not impossible, to be determined.
For this reason, some parameters are to be considered arbitrary
while others can be chosen according to what one can fi nd in a
normal textbook on immunology or in research papers. This has
just been discussed above.
One of the advantages of ABMs lies in the fact that the
interactions of agents are derived from fundamental occurrences
in biological processes, like the binding of receptors, ...