Human mobility and innovation spreading in ancient times: a stochastic agent-based simulation approach

Authored by Natasa Djurdjevac Conrad, Luzie Helfmann, Johannes Zonker, Stefanie Winkelmann, Christof Schuette

Date Published: 2018

DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0153-9

Sponsors: German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG)

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Pseudocode Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

Human mobility always had a great influence on the spreading of cultural, social and technological ideas. Developing realistic models that allow for a better understanding, prediction and control of such coupled processes has gained a lot of attention in recent years. However, the modeling of spreading processes that happened in ancient times faces the additional challenge that available knowledge and data is often limited and sparse. In this paper, we present a new agent-based model for the spreading of innovations in the ancient world that is governed by human movements. Our model considers the diffusion of innovations on a spatial network that is changing in time, as the agents are changing their positions. Additionally, we propose a novel stochastic simulation approach to produce spatio-temporal realizations of the spreading process that are instructive for studying its dynamical properties and exploring how different influences affect its speed and spatial evolution.
Tags
Agent-based model epidemics Migration networks Network human mobility patterns Model diffusion process Prediction Differential-equations Infectious-diseases Europe Complex-systems Spreading process Stochastic simulation algorithm Equation-of-state