Agent-based modeling and simulation in the research of environmental sustainability. A bibliography

Abstract

In the context of the alarming news about climate changes, resource depletion, ecological disasters, and demographic trends, the interest of the researchers and the scientific literature on topics related to sustainability grew exponentially in the past two decades. In 2020 only, the number of publications indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) having the keywords “sustainability” or “sustainable development” in the topic was higher than 42,000. Facing this flood of literature, the present work aims to ease the effort of locating relevant studies about the applications of Agent-based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) in the research of environmental sustainability. This goal is accomplished by: (a) providing a comprehensive bibliography of recent relevant articles on this topic, (b) identifying the most popular domains of application of ABMS in this field, and (c) building a list of the available simulation tools. We found that most of the selected studies (52%) are designed for management related acticities (decision support, policy making etc.), the application domain addressed by the largest number of articles (27%) is agriculture and related activities (pastoralism, hunting, fishery, and forestry), and the most popular simulation platform is NetLogo (15%).

Keywords

• agent-based modeling
• agent-based simulation
• sustainability
• environmental sustainability
• sustainable development