Peer-Olaf Siebers

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Computer Science

Modelling energy retrofit adoption in domestic urban building stocks is vital for policymakers aiming to reduce emissions. The use of surrogate models to evaluate building performance combined with optimization procedures can optimize small building stocks but are insufficient at the urban scale. Recent methods train neural networks using samples o...

Human residential population distributions show patterns of higher density clustering around local services such as shops and places of employment, displaying characteristic length scales; Fourier transforms and spatial autocorrelation show the length scale between UK cities is around 45 km. We use integro-differential equations to model the spatio...

This article describes and justifies a reporting standard to improve data use documentation in Agent-Based Modelling. Following the development of reporting standards for models themselves, empirical modelling has now developed to the point where these standards need to take equally effective account of data use (which previously has tended to be a...

As a response to the urgent call for recovery actions against the COVID-19 crisis, this research aims to identify action priority areas post COVID-19 toward achieving the targets of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development launched by the United Nations (UN). This paper applies a mixed-method appro...

The natural ability of humans to mentally process others’ behavior is central to their social life. This mental process relies largely on understanding the essential constituents of others’ behavior such as their beliefs, desires and goals. This ability, called Theory of Mind (ToM), is the complex cognitive ability to attribute mental states to oth...

The COVID-19 pandemic has immensely impacted the economic, social, and environmental pillars of sustainability in human lives. Due to the scholars' increasing interest in responding to the urgent call for action against the pandemic, the literature of sustainability research considering the COVID-19 consequences is very fragmented. Therefore, a com...

While there is a number of frameworks and protocols in Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) that support the documentation of different aspects of a simulation study, it is surprising to find only a small number dealing with the handling of data. Here we present the results of discussions we had on the topic at the Lorentz Center workshop on Integrating Qual...

Assessing building performance related to energy consumption in post-design-occupancy stage requires knowledge of building occupancy pattern. These occupancy data can potentially be collected from trials and used to improve the prediction capability of building performance models. Due to the limitations of passive sensors in detecting an individual...

In this paper, we present a case study demonstrating how dynamic and uncertain criteria can be incorporated into a multicriteria analysis with the help of discrete event simulation. The simulation guided multicriteria analysis can include both monetary and non-monetary criteria that are static or dynamic, whereas standard multi criteria analysis on...

Purpose - This viewpoint article is concerned with an attempt to advance Organisational Plasticity (OP) modelling concepts by using a novel community modelling framework (PhiloLab) from the Social Simulation community to drive the process of idea generation. In addition, we want to feed back our experience with PhiloLab, as we believe that this way...

The importance of Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) as scientific method to generate data for scientific models in general and for informed policy decisions in particular has been widely recognised. However, the important technique of code testing of implementations like unit testing has not generated much research interested so far. As a possible solut...

Microsimulation is a class of Urban Building Energy Modeling techniques in which energetic interactions between buildings are explicitly resolved. Examples include SUNtool and CitySim+, both of which employ a sophisticated radiosity-based algorithm to solve for radiation exchange. The computational cost of this algorithm increases in proportion to...

The value of interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognised by the research community. Funding bodies are nowadays specifically encouraging that research they fund is interdisciplinary in nature. However, what is often branded as interdisciplinary research is in fact a network of researchers working to deliver a research output. In this rese...

The value of interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognised by the research community. Funding bodies are nowadays specifically encouraging that research they fund is interdisciplinary in nature. However, what is often branded as interdisciplinary research is in fact a network of researchers working to deliver a research output. In this rese...

Modelling and simulation play an increasingly significant role in exploratory studies for informing policy makers on climate change mitigation strategies. There is considerable research being done in creating Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which focus on examining the human impacts on climate change. Many popular IAMs are created as steady st...

Designing, implementing, and applying agent-based models (ABMs) requires a structured approach, part of which is a comprehensive analysis of the output to input variability in the form of uncertainty and sensitivity analysis (SA). The objective of this paper is to assist in choosing, for a given ABM, the most appropriate methods of SA. We argue tha...

Abstract With the decline of Moore’s law and the ever increasing availability of cheap massively parallel hardware, it becomes more and more important to embrace parallel programming methods to implement Agent-Based Simulations (ABS). This has been acknowledged in the field a while ago and numerous research on distributed parallel ABS exists, focus...

When developing a model for an Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) it is very important to select the update-strategy which reflects the semantics of the model as simulation results can vary vastly across different update-strategies. This awareness, we claim, is still underdeveloped in the majority of the field of ABS. In this paper we propose a new termi...

With the decline of Moore's law and the ever increasing availability of cheap massively parallel hardware, it becomes more and more important to embrace parallel programming methods to implement Agent-Based Simulations (ABS). This has been acknowledge in the field a while ago and numerous research on distributed parallel ABS exists, focusing primar...

The importance of accounting for social and behavioural processes when studying public health emergencies has been well-recognised. For infectious disease outbreaks in particular, several methods of incorporating individual behaviour have been put forward, but very few are based on established psychological frameworks. In this paper, we develop a d...

We develop a mixed-integer non-linear programming model for firms’ decarbonisation investment decision-making towards a sustainable environment. Our model seeks the optimal investment for a firm to achieve maximum profit under constraints derived from its environmental protection awareness and the government’s taxation policy. We use an uncertainty...

Travel mode choices are a result of several factors and how they affect individual travellers. This paper examines those factors influencing travellers’ mode choices commuting to and from a university. Furthermore, we investigate how a shift to alternative modes can be stimulated within the current transport system environment of that university. F...

This paper explores how to use property-based testing on a technical level to encode and test specifications of agent-based simulations (ABS). As use case the simple agent-based SIR model is used, where it is shown how to test agent behaviour including transition probabilities. The outcome are specifications expressed directly in code, which relate...

This paper presents property-based testing, an approach for testing implementations of agent-based simulations (ABS), never considered so far in this field. It is a complementary technique to unit-testing and allows to test specifications and laws of an implementation directly in code which is then checked using automated test-data generation. As c...

Purpose Many transport and logistics companies nowadays use raw vehicle GPS data for travel time prediction. However, they face difficult challenges in terms of the costs of information storage, as well as the quality of the prediction. This paper aims to systematically investigate various meta-data (features) that require significantly less storag...

Citation: Achter, S., Borit, M., Chattoe-Brown, E., Palaretti, C. and Siebers, P.-O. (2019) Cherchez Le RAT: A Proposed Plan for Augmenting Rigour and Transparency of Data Use in ABM. Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 4th June 2019. https://roasss.wordpress.com/2019/06/04/rat/

Digital mental healthcare constitutes a complex area for development of novel technological solutions. Designers are frequently forced to deal with requirements posed by a range of different stakeholders with particular needs, goals and interests which may either align or conflict. In search of an inclusive approach for assessing the needs and requ...

Public Goods Games (PGGs) are a standard experimental economic approach to studying cooperative behaviour. There are two types of games: discrete-time and continuous-time PGGs. While discrete-time PGGs (one-shot decisions about contributions to public goods) can be easily done as lab experiments, continuous-time PGGs (where participants can change...

The premise of this working paper is based around agent-based simulation models and how to go about creating them from given incomplete information. Agent-based simulations are stochastic simulations that revolve around groups of agents that each have their own characteristics and can make decisions. Such simulations can be used to emulate real lif...

With the rapid demand for the energy efficient consumption in buildings, bridging the gap between predicted and measured performance is essential. However, recent studies show that there is a significant mismatch between predicted and actual building performance that is widely known as Performance Gap. In some studies, it is revealed that in-use en...

Although driving behaviour has been largely studied amongst private motor vehicles drivers, the literature addressing heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers is scarce. Identifying the existing groups of driving stereotypes and their proportions enables researchers, companies and policy makers to establish group-specific strategies to improve safety and...

In this paper, we develop an integrated model for slacks-based measure (SBM) simultaneously of both the efficiency and the super-efficiency for decision-making units (DMUs) in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Unlike the traditional solution approaches in which we need to identify the efficient DMUs by the SBM model of Tone (2001) [20] before applyi...

This paper describes an agent based simulation model to create solutions for the office space allocation (OSA) problem. OSA is a combinatorial optimization problem concerned with the allocation of available office space to a set of entities such as people. The objective function in the OSA problem involves the minimization of space misuse and the m...

Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) is a methodology in which a system is simulated in a bottom-up approach by modelling the micro interactions of its constituting parts, called agents, out of which the global system behaviour emerges. So far mainly object-oriented techniques and languages have been used in ABS. Using the SIR model of epidemiology, which...

Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) is a methodology in which a system is simulated in a bottom-up approach by modelling the micro interactions of its constituting parts, called agents, out of which the global system behaviour emerges. So far mainly object-oriented techniques and languages have been used in ABS. Using the SIR model of epidemiology, which...

In this paper, we present a case study demonstrating how dynamic and uncertain criteria can be incorporated into a multicriteria analysis with the help of discrete event simulation. The simulation guided multicriteria analysis can include both monetary and non-monetary criteria that are static or dynamic, whereas standard multi criteria analysis on...

The uneven utilisation of modes of transport has a big impact on traffic in transport pathway infrastrutures. For motor vehicles for instance, this situation explains rapid road deterioration and the large amounts of money invested on maintenance and development due to overuse. There are many approaches to managing this problem; however, the impact...

Many factors are considered by travellers’ during travel mode choice decision processes. Such factors include individuals' physical, cognitive, and emotional abilities, which play a significant role in travellers’ attitude and mode usage patterns. Understanding how important each of these factors is to individuals, as well as understanding their im...

A meaningful social life relies on understanding others’ minds and behaviours. The ability to reason about an individual’s mental states such as beliefs and desires, and to understand and predict how these mental states shape an individual’s behaviour is called theory of mind (ToM). In order to examine an individual’s ToM ability, false belief task...

At present there is a lot of research being done simulating building environment with artificial agents and predicting energy usage and other building performance related factors that helps to promote understanding of more sustainable buildings. To understand these energy demands it is important to understand how the building spaces are being used...

This paper introduces a new general platform for the simulation of occupants' presence and behaviours. Called No-MASS (Nottingham Multi-Agent Stochastic Simulation), this generates a synthetic population of agents, predicts their presence and, in the case of residences also their activities and inferred locations, as well as their use of windows, l...

There exist many papers that explain the social force model and its application for modelling pedestrian dynamics. None of these papers, however, explains how to implement the social force model in order to use it for systems simulation studies. In this paper we propose a design pattern (reusable template) that supports the implementation of the so...

Maximizing energy conservation, improving energy efficiency and integration and control of renewable energy sources are critical in order to achieve a low carbon future. An integrated modelling system is needed to evaluate and improve energy performance of urban energy systems’ design and operation, from both financial and environmental perspective...

When looking for a "what-if" analysis tool to support social systems engineering studies, agent-based modelling and simulation should be the method of choice. It is a well-established method for studying human-centric systems. Developing such models, however, is not an easy task, and there is not much guidance around, that clearly explains how this...

In simulation projects, it is generally beneficial to have a toolset that allows following a more formal approach to system analysis, model design and model implementation. Such formal methods are developed to support a systematic approach by making different steps explicit as well as providing a precise language to express the results of those ste...

The challenges from transport modes on human environments, health and economy, have called for investigations into how behavioural changes can be achieved for better resource utilisation. Trip makers' travel demands have been identified, and they include cognitive, physical and affective aspects. Presently there is a shortage of models that integra...

This paper introduces a new general platform for the simulation of occupants' presence and behaviours. Called No-MASS (Nottingham Multi-Agent Stochastic Simulation platform) the platform takes a selection of well validated stochastic models to generate a synthetic population of agents, predicts their presence and, in the case of residences also the...

The micro-simulation of buildings’ energy performance at the urban scale en- tails the dynamic simulation of buildings’ energy demands in a spatially resolved way; and of the supply of energy to meet these demands. Two approaches have emerged to meet the increasingly important need for such simulations: repeated calls to detailed dynamic simulation...

In this paper, we develop an agent-based model which integrates four important elements, i.e. organisational energy management policies/regulations, energy management technologies, electric appliances and equipment, and human behaviour, based on a case study, to simulate the energy consumption in office buildings. With the model, we test the effect...

The paper outlines a feasibility study using modelling and simulation to reduce dwell times and increase rail network capacity. We use agent based modelling, where passengers are treated as a separate entities, basing their movements on rules from the Social Force Model (SFM), proposed by Helbing to model pedestrian dynamics. Implementing this SFM,...

Previous research on social dilemmas demonstrated that various forms of punishment for free-riding can increase contribution levels in public goods games. The way individual group members react to the possibility of punishment can be also affected by individual differences in punishment sensitivity. Therefore, depending individual differences in pu...

This special section on "Engineering Agent-Based Social Simulations" aims to represent the current state of the art in using Software Engineering (SE) methods in ABSS. It includes a mixture of theoretically oriented papers that describe frameworks, notations and methods adapted from SE and practice-oriented papers that demonstrate the application o...

Marketing airline products and services has always been highly competitive and requires that rigorous strategic planning is put in place for achieving maximum growth and profitability. Customer relationship management which is one of the factors that has direct impact on the overall performance of an airline must be guided and maintained by changin...

Advances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the aging of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning until the age of reproduction to keep the species alive. However, as the lifespan extends, unseen problems due to t...

Typical driving behaviors such as car-following and lane-changing can be described based on common concepts. But these behaviors could be different from driver to driver, from nation to nation due to different individual influencing factors (e.g. age, gender, driving age, mood) and situational influencing factors (e.g. weather, congestion, respect...

Agent-based Simulation is used for different purposes in Computer Science and Economics. While computer scientists design agents for controlling complex systems or for instilling objects with autonomy and intelligence, economists use agents for gaining a better understanding of the dynamics within economic systems. For the modelling task both commu...

Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) environments are somewhat of a black box to many modelers and their inner workings are often only understood by the people who developed them. We intend to shed some light into the inner workings of such systems. For the purposes of understanding such systems more in detail, we have developed our own simple ABS environm...

Replacing traditional fossil fuel vehicles with innovative zero-emission vehicles for the transport in ci ties is one of the major tactics to achieve the UK government 2020 target of cutting emission. We are developing an agent-based simulation model to study the possible impact of different governmental interventions on the diffusion of such vehic...

One of the principle causes for deviations between predicted and simulated performance of buildings relates to the stochastic nature of their occupants: their presence, activities whilst present, activity dependent behaviours and the consequent implications for their perceived comfort. A growing research community is active in the development and v...

There is great potential to be explored regarding the use of agent-based modelling and simulation as an alternative paradigm to investigate early-stage cancer interactions with the immune system. It does not suffer from some limitations of ordinary differential equation models, such as the lack of stochasticity, representation of individual behavio...

This paper deals with the application of modern software development tools on simulation development. Recently, Agile Software Development (ASD) methods enjoy an increasing popularity. eXtreme Programming (XP) techniques, one of the techniques which belong to the ASD group of methods is a software development method which improves software quality...

Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABM/S) is still struggling to become one of the main stream simulation methods in Operational Research (OR) and Management Science (MS), despite its generally accepted usefulness when it comes to representing human behaviour in human-centric systems. In other fields, as for example Business Studies, Economics,...

Airports are complex socio-technical systems with many different stakeholders which often have very different needs. Operations Research modelling tools and techniques are used successfully to support the management of such systems by helping to better understand and improve their operations. A review of the literature shows that there are many exi...

Models to understand the impact of management practices on retail performance are often simplistic and assume low levels of noise and linearity. Of course, in real life, retail operations are dynamic, nonlinear and complex. To overcome these limitations, we investigate discrete-event and agent-based modeling and simulation approaches. The joint app...

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) software model is an example of a reasoning architecture for a bounded rational software agent. In our research we plan to expand the application of the BDI software model to the area of simulating human behaviour in social and socio-technical systems. To this effect, in this paper we explore the differences in usi...

Some common systems modelling and simulation approaches for immune problems are Monte Carlo simulations, system dynamics, discrete-event simulation and agent-based simulation. These methods, however, are still not widely adopted in immunology research. In addition, to our knowledge, there is few research on the processes for the development of simu...

In immune system simulation there are two competing simulation approaches: System Dynamics Simulation (SDS) and Agent-Based Simulation (ABS). In the literature there is little guidance on how to choose the best approach for a specific immune problem. Our overall research aim is to develop a framework that helps researchers with this choice. In this...

Technology adoption theories assume that users' acceptance of an innovative technology is on a voluntary basis. However, sometimes users are force to accept an innovation. In this case users have to learn what it is useful for and how to use it. This learning process will enable users to transit from zero knowledge about the innovation to making th...

Simulation is a well established what-if scenario analysis tool in Operational Research (OR). While traditionally Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and System Dynamics Simulation (SDS) are the predominant simulation techniques in OR, a new simulation technique, namely Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), has emerged and is gaining more attention. In our res...

When planning to change operations at ports there are two key stake holders with very different interests involved in the decision making processes. Port operators are attentive to their standards, a smooth service flow and economic viability while border agencies are concerned about national security. The time taken for security checks often inter...

In this paper we present our ideas for conducting a cost benefit analysis by using three different methods: scenario analysis, decision trees and simulation. Then we introduce our case study and examine these methods in a real world situation. We show how these tools can be used and what the results are for each of them. Our aim is to conduct a com...

We introduce a simulation model of the port of Calais with a focus on the operation of immigration controls. Our aim is to compare the cost and benefits of different screening policies. Methodologically, we are trying to understand the limits of discrete event simulation of rare events. When will they become 'too rare' for simulation to give meanin...

Service industries, such as ports, are attentive to their standards, a smooth service flow and economic viability. Cost benefit analysis has proven itself as a useful tool to support this type of decision making; it has been used by businesses and governmental agencies for many years. In this book chapter we demonstrate different modelling methods...

Many advances in research regarding immuno-interactions with cancer were developed with the help of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. These models, however, are not effectively capable of representing problems involving individual localisation, memory and emerging properties, which are common characteristics of cells and molecules of the...

This paper reviews major studies in three traditional lines of research in residential energy consumption in the UK, i.e. economic/infrastructure, behaviour, and load profiling. Based on the review the paper proposes a three-dimensional model for archetyping residential energy consumers in the UK by considering property energy efficiency levels, th...

The efficiency of current cargo screening processes at sea and air ports is unknown as no benchmarks exists against which they could be measured. Some manufacturer benchmarks exist for individual sensors but we have not found any benchmarks that take a holistic view of the screening procedures assessing a combination of sensors and also taking oper...

Many advances in research regarding immuno-interactions with cancer were developed with the help of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. These models, however, are not effectively capable of representing problems involving individual localisation, memory and emerging properties, which are common characteristics of cells and molecules of the...