Policy and Complex Systems
individual and organizational behavior . This is meant to meet the obvious requirement of generality but is also is thought of as a way of making the simulation setting homogeneous over different types of scenarios ( e . g ., imagine comparing health and labor market policies in different simulations of the same economic system ) thereby making the simulation more transparent for both scholars and policymakers .
In order to accomplish this task , we build a simulation platform — recipeWorld — composed of three foundational elements :
• Recipes , 4 represent a variable number of steps to be taken in order achieve a given end ;
• orders , are objects representing the end to be pursued ( e . g ., produce a good ). An order contains technical information ( e . g ., the production steps ) and accounting data ;
• agents , intended as problem solving cores . Each agent — that can be active or inactive — is able to perform one or more of the steps required to complete the recipe .
Recipes are coded as strings of numbers — their components . Each number ( or , if you want , each label ) is related to an act , a sub-routine , of the modeled action .
For instance :
[ 3 1 7 6 ] means :
- execute step 3 , then - execute step 1 , then - …
Recipes can be of any length and can contain subparts with specific structural characteristics , such as : [ 1 4 ( 3 6 5 ) 8 ]
where the instructions in parentheses have to be run in a parallel way ; or
[ 7 4 { 10 } 9 2 ]
where the part in curly brackets has to be run putting together a batch of different recipes to be executed at the same time ( e . g ., transportation phase , with a minimum quantity to be transported ). For instance , these recipes could represent the steps that are necessary to produce according to the demand ( order ) expressed by the market . The good moves from one production unit to the other ( inactive agents ) according to the problem solving skill attributed to each unit . Or else , a person ( active agent , in this case the subject launching the “ order ”) is supposed to suffer from a few healthcare problems represented by recipes as above . Those recipes / events will be activated at different moments of this person ’ s lifetime . In this case , the steps of the recipe are actions to be executed within the healthcare system ( a medical examination , a period in a hospital , having surgery , etc .). It is worth nothing that in both cases , in addition to the economic / social relevance of the emergence detected by the traditional ABM there is a network forming . In the first example the order / product / is moving from a production unit to another , creating a network among the production units ; and , in the second example , the patient acting within the healthcare system creates and then uses links among doctors , hospitals , sanitary tests , etc .
Let us briefly illustrate an example of code in order to show how the network emerges . The case is that of the order about goods to be produced , moving from factory to factory .
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