Nowadays, globalisation is driving us to a process of transformation in economic performance, in shaping institutions and in the definition of economic policy. Globalisation is associated to positive aspects but also to mayor risks. Technology development, markets integration and international trade bring along with and increasing flow of commerce in terms of goods and services, capitals, techn...

Water management is a major concern across the world. From northern China to the Middle East to Africa to the United States, growing populations can stress local water resources as they demand more water for both direct consumption and agriculture. Irrigation based agriculture draws especially heavily on these resources and usually cannot survive without them; however, irrigation systems must b...

Recent studies have suggested that current agent-based models are not sufficiently sophisticated to reproduce results achieved by human collaborative learning and reasoning. Such studies suggest that humans are diverse and dynamic when solving problems socially. However, despite their relevance to problem-solving, these two behavioral features have not yet been fully investigated. In this paper...

Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on interactions between individuals within the population. This should be reflected in fluctuations of the population size even in constant environments. Here, we propos...

This paper uses an economic agent-based model of land use in a hypothetical urban fringe community to examine the effects of large-lot zoning on land conversion, land prices, and the spatial configuration and density of new development. The model incorporates the actions of heterogeneous housing consumers, developers, and farmer/landowners who make economic decisions in land and housing markets...

This paper provides an overview of the Simple Supply Chain Model (SSCM), scenarios derived from this model and the strategies being used to begin to tackle SSCM problems. The paper further provides details of how evolutionary computation is used (via Population Based Incremental Learning) to optimise parameters for the designed strategies.

Individual-based models (IBMs), the biological agentbased models, are currently being applied to the study of microbial systems. A microbial IBM of yeast populations growing in liquid bath cultures has already been designed and implemented in the simulator called INDISIM-YEAST. In order to improve its predictive capabilities and further its development, a deeper understanding of how the variati...

A computer simulation will be presented, which allows studying populations of 10,000 resource-using people. Simulation experiments can be conducted with populations whose initial parameters lead to resource depletion over the long or short term. Systematic experiments using this approach make it possible to determine which measures may lead to sustainable resource use.

In order to assess the future impact of environmental change, ecologists must be able to provide accurate predictions under new environmental conditions. The difficulty with this is that there is often no way of knowing whether the empirical relationships upon which model predictions are based will hold under the new conditions. As a consequence, such predictions are of uncertain accuracy. Beha...