Modelling Human Routines: Conceptualising Social Practice Theory for Agent-Based Simulation
This framework addresses the need for a robust method to simulate human routines, which is crucial for researchers using agent-based simulations to model complex social challenges.
This paper introduces the Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) framework, a domain-independent agent framework designed to integrate human routines into agent-based simulations. SoPrA aims to help understand the role of routines in various social challenges like climate change and disease outbreaks.
Our routines play an important role in a wide range of social challenges such as climate change, disease outbreaks and coordinating staff and patients in a hospital. To use agent-based simulations (ABS) to understand the role of routines in social challenges we need an agent framework that integrates routines. This paper provides the domain-independent Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) framework that satisfies requirements from the literature to simulate our routines. By choosing the appropriate concepts from the literature on agent theory, social psychology and social practice theory we ensure SoPrA correctly depicts current evidence on routines. By creating a consistent, modular and parsimonious framework suitable for multiple domains we enhance the usability of SoPrA. SoPrA provides ABS researchers with a conceptual, formal and computational framework to simulate routines and gain new insights into social systems.