Considering a multi-level model as a society of interacting models: Application to a collective motion example

Abstract

As they involve relationships between interacting individuals and groups, social systems can be described at different levels of resolution. In a number of modeling cases, only one of these levels is explicitly represented. In order to study phenomena where both individual and collective representations are needed, multi-level modeling is a good approach as it explicitly represents these different levels. We propose to consider a multi-level representation from a multi-modeling point of view. This perspective allows explicitly specifying the level's relationships and, therefore, to test hypothesis about interaction between individuals and groups in social systems. We define a framework to better specify the concepts used in multilevel modeling and their relationships. This framework is implemented through the AA4MM meta-model, which benefits from a middleware layer. This meta-model uses the multi-agent paradigm to consider a multi-model as a society of interacting models. We extend this meta-model to consider multilevel modeling, and present a proof of concept of a collective motion example, where we show the advantages of this approach for the study of social phenomena.