in Biological, Cognitive and
Organisational Domains
dr
Catholijn M. Jonker and prof. dr Jan Treur
Agent
Systems Research Group
Department
of Artificial Intelligence
Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam
Within
biological, cognitive, and organisational domains, often multiple interacting
processes occur with dynamics that are hard to handle. For example, modelling
the dynamics of intracellular processes, internal mental dynamics, and
organisational dynamics pose real challenges for biologists, cognitive
scientists and organisation theorists. Currently differential equations are
among the techniques used to address this challenge, with limited success.
Within these disciplines it is felt that more abstract modelling techniques are
required to cope with the complexity; e.g., see
here.
Agent-based
modelling makes the inherent complexity of the dynamics of multiple,
interacting active processes manageable by choosing an appropriate level of
abstraction in describing them. It offers structuring of a dynamic phenomenon
into: internal processes within an agent, externally observable behaviour of an
agent, and organisations of multiple agents. For each of these aggregation
levels techniques are available for specification of dynamic properties,
simulation, and formal analysis of the dynamics. Moreover, relations between
dynamic properties at different levels can be identified, such as
Within this
tutorial such questions are addressed. A methodological perspective is presented
on the basis of a number of realistic case studies: e.g., bacterial behaviour,
Call Center organisation, cooperating information agents, BDI-agents. More information on this modelling perspectieve
can be found here.
A list of references can be found here.
No specific
prerequisite knowledge is required.
Both
lecturers have extensive experience in agent modelling methodology applied
within different application domains. More information on the lecturers: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jonker, http://www.cs.vu.nl/~treur.