The Use of Hybrid Agent Based Systems to Model Petrol Markets

Abstract

The petrol price market is a highly sensitive and competitive market with many processes combining at different temporal and spatial scales to affect each petrol station’s prices. Previous models developed to represent the relationship between petrol and a variable are empirical and mathematical. These suffer from a number of problems, chiefly: the parameters are all on the same scale (behaviours executed at the ‘micro’ level are not tied to ‘global’ level variables like oil prices); the parameters are often difficult to estimate and lack realism; very little, if any, account of any geographical effects is taken, and, finally, mathematical models by their nature only consider quantitative parameters and therefore miss out on qualitative, behavioural information.