When designing an Agent-Based Simulation Model a central challenge is to formulate the appropriate interactions between agents as well as between agents and their environment. In this contribution we present the idea of capturing agent-environment interactions based on the "affordance" concept. Originating in ecological psychology, affordances represent relations between environmental objects and potential actions that agents may perform using those objects. We assume that explicitly handling affordances based on semantic annotation of entities in simulated space may offer a higher abstraction level for dealing with potential interaction. Our approach has two elements: firstly a methodology for using the affordance concept to identify interactions and secondly a suggestion for integrating affordances into agents' decision making. We illustrate our approach indicating an agent-based model of after-earthquake behavior.
['Franziska Klügl']
Using the affordance concept for model design in agent-based simulation