In the Loop: Michael North

Introduction to Agent-based Modeling

Agent-based modeling is an emerging approach to studying systems of interdependent individuals. Agent-based modeling is fundamentally changing the way that analytics can support academic research, business decision-making, and government policy-making. Agent modeling is needed to represent real individual behaviors, interdependent adaptation, individual learning, changing relationships, organizational dynamics, fine-grained spatial interactions, and arbitrarily large populations. Computational advances have enabled a growing number of agent modeling applications in a variety of fields. Application areas include markets, supply chains, epidemiology, social networks, and international relations.

Based on Michael J. North and Charles M. Macal's book Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (Oxford 2007), Michael's lecture will introduce the foundations of agent-based modeling using several practical examples. He will describe methods for developing, verifying, and validating agent models and consider the relationship between agent modeling and traditional modeling techniques.

About Michael

Michael J. North, MBA, Ph.D., is the deputy director of the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation within the Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory. He is also a senior fellow in the Joint Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne. Michael has over twenty years of experience performing advanced modeling for private industry, government, international agencies, and academic research agencies and is the lead developer of the widely used free and open source Repast agent-based modeling suite. He is lead author of the book Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (Oxford 2007) and has authored or co-authored over fifty journal articles and conference papers. Michael holds ten college degrees, including a PhD in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology.