SIZE MATTERS: LARGE-SCALE REPLICATIONS OF EXPERIMENTS WITH FEARLUS

Authored by J Gary Polhill, Nicholas M. Gotts

Date Published: 2010-08

DOI: 10.1142/s0219525910002670

Sponsors: Scottish Executive Rural and Environmental Research and Analysis Directorate

Platforms: Swarm

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/fearlus/download.html

Abstract

We report on replications of early experiments with FEARLUS, using larger numbers of agents, larger numbers of land parcels, and greater network connectivity than in the original work. We find that results from the larger-scale experiments differ from the smaller environments used previously. Whilst results from small communities of agents and environments should not be ignored just because the same effect is not observed in larger communities (and indeed vice versa), this work does raise the extent to which more general conclusions can be drawn from agent-based studies involving fixed population or environment sizes.

Tags

Agent-based modeling Replication model size network topology