Atiyah Elsheikh

Atiyah Elsheikh

This document presents adequate formal terminology for the mathematical specification of a subset of Agent Based Models (ABMs) in the field of Demography. The simulation of the targeted ABMs follows a fixedstep single-clocked pattern. The proposed terminology further improves the model understanding and can act as a stand-alone protocol for the specification and optionally the documentation of a significant set of (demographic) ABMs. Nevertheless, it is imaginable the this terminology can serve as an inspiring basis for further improvement to the largely-informal widely-used model documentation and communication O.D.D. protocol [Grimm and et al., 2020, Amouroux et al., 2010] to reduce many sources of ambiguity which hinder model replications by other modelers. A published demographic model documentation, largely simplified version of the Lone Parent Model [Gostoli and Silverman, 2020] is separately published in [Elsheikh, 2023c] as illustration for the formal terminology presented here. The model was implemented in the Julia language [Elsheikh, 2023b] based on the Agents.jl julia package [Datseris et al., 2022].

Atiyah Elsheikh

This documentation specifies a simplified non-calibrated demographic agent-based model of the UK, a largely simplified version of the Lone Parent Model presented in [Gostolil and Silverman 2020]. In the presented model, individuals of an initial population are subject to ageing, deaths, births, divorces and marriages throughout a simplified map of towns of the UK. The specification employs the formal terminology presented in [Elsheikh 2023a]. The main purpose of the model is to explore and exploit capabilities of the state-of-the-art Agents.jl Julia package [Datseris2022] in the context of demographic modeling applications. Implementation is provided via the Julia package MiniDemographicABM.jl [Elsheikh 2023b]. A specific simulation is progressed with a user-defined simulation fixed step size on a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis or even an arbitrary user-defined clock rate. The model can serve for comparative studies if implemented in other agent-based modelling frameworks and programming languages. Moreover, the model serves as a base implementation to be adjusted to realistic large-scale socio-economics, pandemics or immigration studies mainly within a demographic context.

Atiyah Elsheikh

The execution and runtime performance of model-based analysis tools for realistic large-scale ABMs (Agent-Based Models) can be excessively long. This due to the computational demand exponentially proportional to the model size (e.g. Population size) and the number of model parameters. Even the runtime of a single simulation of a realistic ABM may demand huge computational resources when attempting to employ realistic population size. The main aim of this ad-hoc brief report is to highlight some of surrogate models that were adequate and computationally less demanding for nonlinear dynamical models in various modeling application areas.To the author knowledge, these methods have been not, at least extensively, employed for ABMs within the field of (SHCS) Social Health Computational Sciences, yet. Thus, they might be, but not necessarily, useful in progressing state of the art for establishing surrogate models for ABMs in the field of SHCS.