A Framework for Social Simulation Modelling: a Hierarchy of Contextual Levels

This paper addresses the problem of the diversity of perspectives about key concepts in the enterprise of the social simulation community and, in order to deal with this difficulty, proposes a Hierarchy of Contextual Levels as a framework for social simulation modelling. The concepts of language, system, levels of systems and context are reviewed from a general systems theory and from a simulation and modelling theory perspectives. Afterwards, from this arena, issues around the work of the social simulation community are examined in order to point out some difficulties and argue about the need for an appropriate modelling framework. It is claimed that making explicit the contextual levels around simulation experiments is of a central importance because of the high level of relativity a social simulation experiment presents. The usefulness of this framework is exemplified by analyzing the context of some MABS models and by reviewing a notion of complexity .