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Simulating Social Complexity pp 349–365Cite as

Documenting Social Simulation Models: The ODD Protocol as a Standard

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Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

The clear documentation of simulations is important for their communication, replication, and comprehension. It is thus helpful for such documentation to follow minimum standards. The ‘overview, design concepts, and details’ document protocol (ODD) is specifically designed to guide the description of individual- and agent-based simulation models (ABMs) in journal articles. Popular among ecologists, it is also increasingly used in the social simulation community. Here, we describe the protocol and give an annotated example of its use, with a view in facilitating its wider adoption and encouraging higher standards in simulation description.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Many of these endeavours have been covered in submissions to the “model-to-model” series of workshops, organised by members of the social simulation community (Hales et al. 2003; Rouchier et al. 2008. The second workshop was held as a parallel session of the ESSA 2004 conference: see http://www.insisoc.org/ESSA04/M2M2.htm).

  2. 2.

    It is often the case that a substantial description needs to be included in the main text so readers can get an idea of what is being discussed, but maybe a more complete description might be added in an appendix.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Bruce Edmonds for inviting us to contribute this chapter and for his helpful comments and suggested amendments to earlier drafts. Gary Polhill’s contribution was funded by the Scottish Government.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecological Modelling, UFZ, Helmholtz Centre of Environmental Research – UFZ, Permoserstr. 15, D-04318, Leipzig, Germany

    Volker Grimm

  2. The James Hutton Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen, AB15 8QH, UK

    Gary Polhill

  3. Environment Department, University of York, York, UK

    Julia Touza

Authors
  1. Volker Grimm
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  2. Gary Polhill
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  3. Julia Touza
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Volker Grimm .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, Business School, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Bruce Edmonds

  2. Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, Business School, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Ruth Meyer

Further Reading

Further Reading

Railsback and Grimm’s (2012) textbook introduces to agent-based modelling with examples described using ODD. The OpenABM website (http://openabm.org) is a portal specifically designed to facilitate the dissemination of simulation code and descriptions of these using the ODD protocol. The original reference document for ODD is Grimm et al. (2006) with the most recent update being Grimm et al. (2010). Polhill (2010) is an overview of the 2010 update of ODD written specifically with the social simulation community in mind.

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Grimm, V., Polhill, G., Touza, J. (2017). Documenting Social Simulation Models: The ODD Protocol as a Standard. In: Edmonds, B., Meyer, R. (eds) Simulating Social Complexity. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66948-9_15

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66948-9

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