Agent-based Model - History

History

The idea of agent-based modeling was developed as a relatively simple concept in the late 1940s. Since it requires computation-intensive procedures, it did not become widespread until the 1990s.

The history of the agent-based model can be traced back to the Von Neumann machine, a theoretical machine capable of reproduction. The device von Neumann proposed would follow precisely detailed instructions to fashion a copy of itself. The concept was then improved by von Neumann's friend Stanisław Ulam, also a mathematician; Ulam suggested that the machine be built on paper, as a collection of cells on a grid. The idea intrigued von Neumann, who drew it up—creating the first of the devices later termed cellular automata.

Another improvement was introduced by the mathematician John Conway. He constructed the well-known Game of Life. Unlike von Neumann's machine, Conway's Game of Life operated by tremendously simple rules in a virtual world in the form of a 2-dimensional checkerboard.

One of the earliest agent-based models in concept was Thomas Schelling's segregation model, which was discussed in his paper Dynamic Models of Segregation in 1971. Though Schelling originally used coins and graph paper rather than computers, his models embodied the basic concept of agent-based models as autonomous agents interacting in a shared environment with an observed aggregate, emergent outcome.

In the early 1980s, Robert Axelrod hosted a tournament of Prisoner's Dilemma strategies and had them interact in an agent-based manner to determine a winner. Axelrod would go on to develop many other agent-based models in the field of political science that examine phenomena from ethnocentrism to the dissemination of culture.

In the late 1980s, Craig Reynolds' work on flocking models contributed to the development of some of the first biological agent-based models that contained social characteristics. He tried to model the reality of lively biological agents, known as artificial life, a term coined by Christopher Langton.

The first use of the word "agent" and a definition as it is currently used today is hard to track down. One candidate appears to be John Holland and John H. Miller's 1991 paper "Artificial Adaptive Agents in Economic Theory" which is based on an earlier conference presentation of theirs.

At the same time, during the 1980s, social scientists, mathematicians, operations researchers, and a scattering of people from other disciplines developed Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT). This field grew as a special interest group of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) and its sister society, the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA). Through the mid-1990s, the field focused on such issues as designing effective teams, understanding the communication required for organizational effectiveness, and the behavior of social networks. With the appearance of StarLogo in 1990, SWARM and NetLogo in the mid-1990s and RePast and AnyLogic in 2000, as well as some custom-designed code, CMOT—later renamed Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) — incorporated more and more agent-based modeling. Samuelson (2000) is a good brief overview of the early history, and Samuelson (2005) and Samuelson and Macal (2006) trace the more recent developments. Bonabeau (2002) is a good survey of the potential of agent-based modeling as of the time that its modelling software became widely available.

Kathleen M. Carley developed an early ABM, to explore the co-evolution of social networks and culture.

Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell developed a large-scale ABM, the Sugarscape, to simulate and explore the role of social phenomenon such as seasonal migrations, pollution, sexual reproduction, combat, and transmission of disease and even culture.

Nigel Gilbert published the first textbook on Social Simulation: Simulation for the social scientist (1999) and established a journal from the perspective of social sciences: the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). Other than JASSS, Agent-based Models of any discipline are within scope of SpringerOpen journal "Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling" (CASM).

In the late 1990s, the merger of TIMS and ORSA to form INFORMS, and the move by INFORMS from two meetings each year to one, helped to spur the CMOT group to form a separate society, the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Sciences (NAACSOS). Kathleen Carley, of Carnegie Mellon University, was a major contributor, especially to models of social networks, obtaining National Science Foundation funding for the annual conference and serving as the first President of NAACSOS. She was succeeded by David Sallach of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, and then by Michael Prietula of Emory University. At about the same time NAACSOS began, the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and the Pacific Asian Association for Agent-Based Approach in Social Systems Science (PAAA), counterparts of NAACSOS, were organized. Nowadays, these three organizations collaborate internationally. The First World Congress on Social Simulation was held under their joint sponsorship in Kyoto, Japan, in August 2006. The Second World Congress was held in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., in July 2008, with George Mason University taking the lead role in local arrangements.

More recently, Ron Sun developed methods for basing agent-based simulation on models of human cognition, known as cognitive social simulation. Bill McKelvey, Suzanne Lohmann, Dario Nardi, Dwight Read and others at UCLA have also made significant contributions in organizational behavior and decision-making. Since 2001, UCLA has arranged a conference at Lake Arrowhead, California, that has become another major gathering point for practitioners in this field.