Social Simulations: from Agent-Based Modeling to Digital Twins
For researchers in computational social science, this provides a structured overview of methodological progress, but it is a review, not a novel contribution.
This chapter reviews the evolution of social simulation from agent-based models to AI-enhanced simulations and Social Digital Twins, highlighting the shift from abstract models to realistic representations of specific social systems.
This book chapter covers the evolution of social simulation from classical agent-based models, in which agents interact according to explicitly defined behavioral rules, to AI-enhanced simulations based on Large Language Models and, ultimately, Social Digital Twins: high-fidelity, data-driven representations of real-world socio-technical systems. Along this trajectory, we discuss the main methodological foundations, applications, advantages, and limitations of each paradigm, highlighting the progressive shift from abstract models designed to investigate general social mechanisms toward increasingly realistic computational representations of specific social systems.