The simulation of social behavior in a variety of domains is an increasingly important technological tool.
eference survey of social simulation work, Social Simulation: Technologies, Advances and New Discoveries comprehensively collects the most exciting developments in the field. Drawing research contributions from a vibrant community of experts on social simulation, this Premier Reference Source provides a set of unique and innovative approaches, ranging from agent-based modeling to empirically based simulations, as well as applications in business, governmental, scientific, and other contexts. This book will be a significant reference tool for researchers, educators, and practitioners in such fields as sociology, geography, economics, environmental science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer engineering, and networks, and a valuable, interdisciplinary addition to academic libraries.
About the Author
Bruce Edmonds is Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and a Senior Research Fellow there. He gained his first degree in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in philosophy on Measures of complexity. His field is the intersection of sociology and computer science: both applying social mechanisms to the organisation of distributed computer science and the use of computational techniques to model aspects of society.
Cesareo Hernandez Iglesias is Professor of Business and Economics (B&E) and head of the Business and Economics Department at the University of Valladolid, Spain. He graduated from the University of Barcelona in Industrial Engineering (1970) and Economics (1974). He obtained his Ph.D. in 1975 on applications of Control Theory to Econometrics. He initially worked in time series analysis in econometric modelling as a postgraduate at the L.S.E. and Imperial College in London from 1971-74. His current research interests within the INSISOC Group (Engineering Social Systems Group) include economic methodology and social simulation.
Klaus G. Troitzsch has been a full professor of computer applications in the social sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1986. He took his PhD in political science from the University of Hamburg. From 1974 to 1978 he was a member of the Liberal Party Group in the Parliament of Hamburg. In 1979 he returned to academia as a senior researcher in an election research project. His main interests in teaching and research are social science methodology and, particularly, the simulation of social processes. He was among the founders of the Research Committee on Modelling and Simulation of the German Sociological Association (1988), of the SimSoc Consortium, which publishes the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS, now in its tenth year), and of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA). Most of his research projects were devoted to developing simulation tools for micro, multilevel, and agent-based simulation or to implement simulation courses for social scientists, part of which have been offered in annual summer and spring courses for nearly ten years. He is author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books and articles on simulation, and he organized several national and international conferences in social simulation.