Generating Executable Code from High-Level Social or Socio-Ecological Model Descriptions

Abstract

Agent-Based Modelling has been used for social simulation because of the several benefits it entails. Social models are often constructed by inter-disciplinary teams that include subject-matter experts with no programming skills. These experts are typically involved in the creation of the conceptual model, but not the verification or validation of the simulation model. The Overview, Design concepts, and Details (ODD) protocol has emerged as a way of presenting a model at a high level of abstraction and as an effort towards improving the reproducibility of Agent-Based Models (ABMs) but it is typically written after a model has been completed. This paper reverses the process and provides non-programming experts with a user-friendly and extensible tool called ODD2ABM for creating and altering models on their own. This is done by formalizing ODD using concepts abstracted from the NetLogo language, enabling users to generate NetLogo code from an ODD description automatically. We verified the ODD2ABM tool with three existing NetLogo models.