Specifying models: The ODD protocol
Class #4 (Tue., Sep 7)
Reading:
Required Reading (everyone):
- Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling, Ch. 3.
Reading Notes:
Read carefully through the different design principles. Some of them have meanings that are a bit different from what you might infer from colloquial use.
For instance:
- Adaptation does not mean a persistent change in a turtle’s behavior similar to the biological/Darwinian sense of adaptation in species. Rather, it means the way an agent changes its behavior in response to its immediate conditions. Thus, adaptation in the ODD sense might include behaviors such as eating when you are hungry (eating is an adaptation to hunger), putting on warmer clothing when it’s cold out (bundling up is an adaptation to cold), and running away from a predator.
- The kind of persistent changes that arise over time from experience fall under the ODD design concept of learning: If there is more food near a river than on hills, turtles may learn to go to rivers when they are hungry.
You can download several useful documents related to the ODD protocol from the class web site:
- The journal article, V. Grimm et al. (2010). “The ODD protocol: A review and first update” Ecological Modeling 221, 2760–68.. https://ees4760.jgilligan.org/files/odd/Grimm_2010_ODD_update.pdf
- A Word document that provides a template for writing ODDs: https://ees4760.jgilligan.org/files/odd/Grimm_2010_odd_template.docx
- Lists of scientific publications using agent-based and individual-based models that either do or don’t use the ODD protocol (this appeared as Appendix 1 of the Grimm et al. paper):
