Computational Model Library

Our mission is to help computational modelers develop, document, and share their computational models in accordance with community standards and good open science and software engineering practices. Model authors can publish their model source code in the Computational Model Library with narrative documentation as well as metadata that supports open science and emerging norms that facilitate software citation, computational reproducibility / frictionless reuse, and interoperability. Model authors can also request private peer review of their computational models. Models that pass peer review receive a DOI once published.

All users of models published in the library must cite model authors when they use and benefit from their code.

Please check out our model publishing tutorial and feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about publishing your model(s) in the Computational Model Library.

Displaying 10 of 18 results cycles clear search

This model tests whether local housing supply elasticity governs crash severity inside a single metropolitan housing market. Saiz (2010) established that across US metros, regions constrained by geography and regulation experience deeper boom-bust cycles than flexible ones. That finding is routinely applied downward to neighborhoods and ZIP codes as though the mechanism scaled without qualification.

The empirical record for the Washington DC and Northern Virginia region says it does not. Across 84 ZIP codes, measured supply elasticity ranges from 0.35 to 4.95 with a median of 1.21. The worst single-year price decline between 2007 and 2012 averaged 9.6 percent in constrained ZIP codes and 9.0 percent in flexible ones, a gap that cannot be distinguished from noise. Wide variation in the proposed cause, no meaningful separation in the proposed effect.

The model embeds households, houses and a metro-wide credit condition in the real ZIP geography of the region using three GIS layers and an empirical price panel. Local elasticity governs construction, exactly as theory predicts. Prices are driven by a shared macro drift schedule and, under the credit-amplified mode, by a leverage cycle with a financial accelerator and a deviation penalty. The design question is whether those shared forces are sufficient to override local supply differences at the sub-metropolitan scale.

This paper develops a spatial agent-based model to examine how fertility regime shifts reshape population concentration and wealth distribution in an abstract urban system. Migration decisions combine population preference, cultural homophily, expected net income, and resource endowment through a standardised softmax utility. The design is deliberately stylised: it is not calibrated to a particular country or city system, but is intended to isolate the feedbacks linking migration, fertility, urban scaling, and accumulated wealth.
The simulations reveal robust directional asymmetry. When fertility shifts from low to high, population concentration responds rapidly; when fertility shifts from high to low, concentration declines only after a detectable delay and may temporarily continue in the previous direction. Wealth adds a second layer of hysteresis: cell total-wealth concentration follows population concentration with delay, cell mean-wealth inequality and system-level wealth indicators are slower still, and phase-space trajectories form loops rather than collapsing onto a single population–wealth curve. Robustness experiments indicate that longer fertility cycles, wider mobility neighbourhoods, and smoother resource landscapes change the magnitude of delay and overshoot, but do not remove the qualitative asymmetry. The paper argues that demographic decline should be understood not as the mirror image of demographic expansion, but as a path-dependent transition mediated by fast migration-income feedbacks and slower fertility, cohort, culture, and wealth mechanisms.

Peer reviewed Green Consumption Tipping Point

Mario | Published Thursday, February 26, 2026

This model is a minimal agent-based model (ABM) of green consumption and market tipping dynamics in a stylised two-firm economy. It is designed as an existence proof to illustrate how weak individual preferences, when combined with habit formation, social influence, and firm price adaptation, can generate non-linear transitions (tipping points) in market outcomes.

The economy consists of:
1) Two firms, each supplying a differentiated consumption bundle that differs in its fixed green share (one relatively greener, one less green).
2) Many households, each consuming a unit mass per period and allocating consumption between the two firms.

In his 2003 book, Historical Dynamics (ch. 4), Turchin describes and briefly analyzes a spatial ABM of his metaethnic frontier theory, which is essentially a formalization of a theory by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century. In the model, polities compete with neighboring polities and can absorb them into an empire. Groups possess “asabiya”, a measure of social solidarity and a sense of shared purpose. Regions that share borders with other groups will have increased asabiya do to salient us vs. them competition. High asabiya enhances the ability to grow, work together, and hence wage war on neighboring groups and assimilate them into an empire. The larger the frontier, the higher the empire’s asabiya.
As an empire expands, (1) increased access to resources drives further growth; (2) internal conflict decreases asabiya among those who live far from the frontier; and (3) expanded size of the frontier decreases ability to wage war along all frontiers. When an empire’s asabiya decreases too much, it collapses.  Another group with more compelling asabiya eventually helps establish a new empire.

This study presents a System Dynamics (SD) model that explores the “trajectories of homelessness” among youth outside of the formal care system. Unlike traditional approaches that view runaway behavior as a discrete choice, this model reinterprets it as a neurobiological adaptation to chronic resource deprivation and systemic neglect.
​The model incorporates key mechanisms such as ‘Allostatic Load’ accumulation, ‘PFC-Amygdala Switching’, and the ‘Iatrogenic Effects’ of shelter policies. It utilizes Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate how structural factors create a “probabilistic vulnerability,” trapping youth in cycles of survival crime and isolation regardless of individual resilience.
​The uploaded code includes a Python implementation of the model to ensure reproducibility of the stochastic analysis presented in the paper.

Simple models with different types of complexity

Michael Roos | Published Tuesday, September 17, 2024 | Last modified Saturday, March 01, 2025

Hierarchical problem-solving model
The model simulates a hierarchical problem-solving process in which a manager delegates parts of a problem to specialists, who attempt to solve specific aspects based on their unique skills. The goal is to examine how effectively the hierarchical structure works in solving the problem, the total cost of the process, and the resulting solution quality.

Problem-solving random network model
The model simulates a network of agents (generalists) who collaboratively solve a fixed problem by iterating over it and using their individual skills to reduce the problem’s complexity. The goal is to study the dynamics of the problem-solving process, including agent interactions, work cycles, total cost, and solution quality.

Peer reviewed Agent-based model to simulate equilibria and regime shifts emerged in lake ecosystems

no contributors listed | Published Tuesday, January 25, 2022

(An empty output folder named “NETLOGOexperiment” in the same location with the LAKEOBS_MIX.nlogo file is required before the model can be run properly)
The model is motivated by regime shifts (i.e. abrupt and persistent transition) revealed in the previous paleoecological study of Taibai Lake. The aim of this model is to improve a general understanding of the mechanism of emergent nonlinear shifts in complex systems. Prelimnary calibration and validation is done against survey data in MLYB lakes. Dynamic population changes of function groups can be simulated and observed on the Netlogo interface.
Main functional groups in lake ecosystems were modelled as super-individuals in a space where they interact with each other. They are phytoplankton, zooplankton, submerged macrophyte, planktivorous fish, herbivorous fish and piscivorous fish. The relationships between these functional groups include predation (e.g. zooplankton-phytoplankton), competition (phytoplankton-macrophyte) and protection (macrophyte-zooplankton). Each individual has properties in size, mass, energy, and age as physiological variables and reproduce or die according to predefined criteria. A system dynamic model was integrated to simulate external drivers.
Set biological and environmental parameters using the green sliders first. If the data of simulation are to be logged, set “Logdata” as true and input the name of the file you want the spreadsheet(.csv) to be called. You will need create an empty folder called “NETLOGOexperiment” in the same level and location with the LAKEOBS_MIX.nlogo file. Press “setup” to initialise the system and “go” to start life cycles.

HyperMu’NmGA - Effect of Hypermutation Cycles in a NetLogo Minimal Genetic Algorithm

Cosimo Leuci | Published Tuesday, October 27, 2020 | Last modified Sunday, July 31, 2022

A minimal genetic algorithm was previously developed in order to solve an elementary arithmetic problem. It has been modified to explore the effect of a mutator gene and the consequent entrance into a hypermutation state. The phenomenon seems relevant in some types of tumorigenesis and in a more general way, in cells and tissues submitted to chronic sublethal environmental or genomic stress.
For a long time, some scholars suppose that organisms speed up their own evolution by varying mutation rate, but evolutionary biologists are not convinced that evolution can select a mechanism promoting more (often harmful) mutations looking forward to an environmental challenge.
The model aims to shed light on these controversial points of view and it provides also the features required to check the role of sex and genetic recombination in the mutator genes diffusion.

MTC_Model_Pilditch&Madsen

Toby Pilditch | Published Friday, October 09, 2020

Micro-targeted vs stochastic political campaigning agent-based model simulation. Written by Toby D. Pilditch (University of Oxford, University College London), in collaboration with Jens K. Madsen (University of Oxford, London School of Economics)

The purpose of the model is to explore the various impacts on voting intention among a population sample, when both stochastic (traditional) and Micto-targeted campaigns (MTCs) are in play. There are several stages of the model: initialization (setup), campaigning (active running protocols) and vote-casting (end of simulation). The campaigning stage consists of update cycles in which “voters” are targeted and “persuaded” - updating their beliefs in the campaign candidate / policies.

This model is an extension of the Artificial Long House Valley (ALHV) model developed by the authors (Swedlund et al. 2016; Warren and Sattenspiel 2020). The ALHV model simulates the population dynamics of individuals within the Long House Valley of Arizona from AD 800 to 1350. Individuals are aggregated into households that participate in annual agricultural and demographic cycles. The present version of the model incorporates features of the ALHV model including realistic age-specific fertility and mortality and, in addition, it adds the Black Mesa environment and population, as well as additional methods to allow migration between the two regions.

As is the case for previous versions of the ALHV model as well as the Artificial Anasazi (AA) model from which the ALHV model was derived (Axtell et al. 2002; Janssen 2009), this version makes use of detailed archaeological and paleoenvironmental data from the Long House Valley and the adjacent areas in Arizona. It also uses the same methods as the original AA model to estimate annual maize productivity of various agricultural zones within the Long House Valley. A new environment and associated methods have been developed for Black Mesa. Productivity estimates from both regions are used to determine suitable locations for households and farms during each year of the simulation.

Displaying 10 of 18 results cycles clear search

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