Skip to Main Content
Social Systems Engineering
book

Social Systems Engineering

by César García-Díaz, Camilo Olaya
December 2017
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
312 pages
12h 3m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Social Systems Engineering

8Using Actor‐Network Theory in Agent‐Based Modelling

Sandra Méndez‐Fajardo, Rafael A. Gonzalez and Ricardo A. Barros‐Castro

8.1 Introduction

Design‐oriented research usually involves modelling for the purposes of representing, exploring or simulating real‐world situations. A widely used approach is agent‐based modelling (ABM); agent‐based models help us to understand or reveal the effects of collective behaviour by representing the rules governing agent decisions and the influence of these decisions on a virtual (or sometimes actual) real‐world environment. A number of different theories guide the design of individual agents, their interactions and the environment on which they act, most of which are focused on representing the currently observed situation or are driven by historical data in order to enable calibration and the interpolation of future scenarios. However, these approaches often lack the in‐depth reconstruction of historical trajectories or fail to capture the dynamics that have led to collective patterns, whether successful or not. Furthermore, most of these strategies treat agents as human actors or institutions, leaving out non‐human actors or treating them as part of a different category, despite the fact that both human and non‐human actors exercise agency, interaction and collective behaviour. Thus, the main research question addressed in this chapter is how to extract key elements from historical trajectories in socio‐technical systems via the identification ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Netcentric System of Systems Engineering with DEVS Unified Process

Netcentric System of Systems Engineering with DEVS Unified Process

Saurabh Mittal, José L. Risco Martín
Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Ron S. Kenett, Robert S. Swarz, Avigdor Zonnenshain
A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems

A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems

David Nunes, Jorge Sá Silva, Fernando Boavida

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118974452Purchase book