Narrative scenarios, mediating formalisms, and the agent-based simulation of land use change

Abstract

The kinds of system studied using agent-based simulation are intuitively, and to a considerable extent scientifically, understood through natural language narrative scenarios, and that finding systematic and well-founded ways to relate such scenarios to simulation models, and in particular to their outputs, is important in both scientific and policy-related applications of agentbased simulation. The paper outlines a projected approach to the constellation of problems this raises - which derive from the gulf between the semantics of natural and programming languages. It centers on the use of mediating formalisms: ontologies and specialised formalisms for qualitative representation and reasoning. Examples are derived primarily from ongoing work on the simulation of land use change. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.