Agent-based Modeling in Practice#

In this chapter we want to give you some guidelines on how you could approach building your own ABMs. There are different methodologies and some of it comes down to a research field’s demands and traditions as well as personal research preferences. Additionally, there is no established historical ABM methodology. One goal of this compendium is to give a stepping stone for the development of methodology, so do take this also as an invitation to criticise and discuss those!

For this reason we also dedicate one section to the importance of modeling standards and suggestions how deal with the current lack of established standards in history.

The last section of this chapter is about caveats in using ABM, important discussions as well as desiderata that should be addressed to establish a community of practice in ABM for historians.