Complex systems modeling can provide useful insights when designing and anticipating the impact of public health interventions. We developed an agent-based, or individual-based, computation model (ABM) to aid in evaluating and refining implementation of behavior change interventions designed to increase physical activity and healthy eating and reduce unnecessary weight gain among school-aged ch...

Although the majority of researchers interested in ABM increasingly agree that the most natural way to program their models is to adopt OO practices, UML diagrams are still largely absent from their publications. In the last 15 years, the use of UML has risen constantly, to the point where UML has become the de facto standard for graphical visualization of software development. UML and its 13 d...

tuberculous meningitis (tbm) and acute bacterial meningitis (abm) cause substantial mortality and morbidity in both children and adults. identification of poor prognostic factors at patient's admission could prepare physicians for more aggressive monitoring of patients with meningitis. the objective of this study was to determine the predictive value of neurological features to differentiate ab...

This report reviews both general agent based modelling (ABM) and battlefield-specific ABM toolkits against established criteria, namely flexibility, documentation, speed, and facilities. The other main focus of this report is to consider which ABM toolkits are best suited to studying self-organisation, adaptation, and causality in networks, since these are all essential parts of complex adaptiv...

In the present study, we investigated the anti-inflammatory activity of water-soluble polysaccharide of Agaricus blazei Murill (WSP-AbM) on ovariectomized osteopenic rats. The rats were administered orally WSP-AbM (200 mg/kg BW) for 8 weeks. Subsequent serum maleic dialdehyde (MDA) level, total antioxidant status (TAOS), nuclear factor kappa B (NF- κ B) level, polymorphonuclear (PMN) cells leve...

In this contribution we aim at anchoring Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) simulations in actual models of human psychology. More specifically, we apply unidirectional ABM to social psychological models using low level agents (i.e., intra-individual) to examine whether they generate better predictions, in comparison to standard statistical approaches, concerning the intentions of performing a behavior...

By killing cattle and otherwise complicating management, the many species of larkspur (Delphinium spp.) present a serious, intractable, and complex challenge to livestock grazing management in the western United States. Among the many obstacles to improving our understanding of cattle-larkspur dynamics has been the difficulty of testing different grazing management strategies in the field, as t...

Agent-based models (ABM) are ideal tools to deal with the complexity of pest invasion throughout agricultural socio-ecological systems, yet very few studies have applied them in such context. In this work we developed an ABM that simulates interactions between farmers and an invasive insect pest in an agricultural landscape of the tropical Andes. Our specific aims were to use the model 1) to as...

Agent-based modeling (ABM), also termed 'Individual-based modeling (IBM)', is a computational approach that simulates the interactions of autonomous entities (agents, or individual cells) with each other and their local environment to predict higher level emergent patterns. A literature-derived rule set governs the actions of each individual agent. While this technique has been widely used in t...