Formal specification terminology for demographic agent-based models of fixed-step single-clocked simulations
This work addresses model replication issues for demographers and ABM researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing informal protocols like O.D.D.
The paper tackles the problem of ambiguous documentation in demographic agent-based models by proposing formal terminology for fixed-step single-clocked simulations, resulting in improved model understanding and a stand-alone protocol for specification.
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].