Agent-based Modelling for Simulating Social Systems
International students
International students
About the course
How do political polarisation, social fads, or financial bubbles arise? How can the decisions of individuals lead to major societal change? In this course, students use agent-based social simulation (ABSS) to explore and understand complex social systems. These are characterised by individuals acting, cooperating, and competing, which can lead to unexpected outcomes.
By modelling human cognition and behaviour, students simulate interactions among individuals such as voters, consumers, or users in social networks and analyse how patterns emerge at the societal level.
The course combines theory and practice with examples from social influence, synthetic populations and demography, epidemics, economics, and social networks. Students learn how to design, implement, document, and analyse simulation models. The course is aimed at students in engineering and social sciences interested in advanced, data-driven approaches to understanding and shaping society.
Course content
The course aims for students to develop knowledge of agent-based modelling and simulation, including planning and conducting simulation experiments and developing simulation models to study social systems consisting of interactions between individuals, groups, and institutions.
Agent-based modelling simulates human behaviour using intelligent agents, enabling the creation of artificial populations for studying complex phenomena in social systems.
Students are introduced to theoretical and practical aspects including abstraction of real systems, modelling decision-making and actions, data collection, implementation of models, planning and conducting experiments, and analysis and interpretation of results.
Applications include logistics, economics, and social sciences where simulation supports decision-making.
The course consists of the following components:
- Introduction to modelling and simulation
- Discrete-event simulation
- Agent-based modelling
- Modelling and simulation of social systems
- Design of simulation experiments
- Analysis and interpretation of simulation results
- Applications of agent-based modelling and simulation
- Implementation of simulation models
Entry requirements and selection
Entry requirements
General entry requirements + English 6. Or: English level 2
Selection
66% Upper Secondary Grades - 34% Swedish Scholastic Aptitude Test (SweSAT)
Course literature
Current literature list is available in the syllabus for the course
Course evaluation
Malmö University provides students who participate in, or who have completed a course, with the opportunity to express their opinions and describe their experiences of the course by completing a course evaluation administered by the University. The University will compile and summarise the results of course evaluations. The University will also inform participants of the results and any decisions relating to measures taken in response to the course evaluations. The results will be made available to the students (HF 1:14).
