Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

22 The Agent‐Based Model Canvas: A Modeling Lingua Franca for Computational Social Science

Ivan Garibay¹, Chathika Gunaratne², Niloofar Yousefi¹ and Steve Scheinert³

¹ Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, College of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA

² Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA

³ Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA

Introduction

When (Grimm et al. 2006) first published their Overview, Design Concepts, and Details (ODD) framework, they recognized both the growing use of computational models in the social sciences, particularly agent‐based models (ABMs), and the difficulty in describing ABMs with sufficient clarity for other researchers to understand and replicate the model design components and construction. When Ostrom (2005) published the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, she recognized the difficulty in describing complex institutions and the spaces in which they operate. The framework provides a tool for organizing inquiry and description of institutions by providing researchers with a set of questions to answer, which, when all are answered, provide a thorough description and analysis of that institution. Both identified a common challenge for complex computational models: describing models is itself a difficult and complicated ...