An ex ante assessment of value conflicts and social acceptance of sustainable heating systems: An agent-based modelling approach

This paper demonstrates an approach to assess, ex ante, the social acceptance of sustainable heating systems in city districts. More sustainable heating systems are required in city districts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems may lack social acceptance as they often require significant adjustments to homes and may...

EMLab-Consumer—Simulating Energy Efficiency Adoption Decisions of European Households

This paper introduces EMLab-Consumer, an agent-based model developed in the H2020 project Cheetah, on energy efficiency of households. The model builds on the theory of planned behavior, a large European survey and a variety of choice models generated from the same survey. It studies adoption of a number of energy efficient appliances and...

Archetypical Patterns in Agent-Based Models

Complex systems produce recognizable self-organized patterns across time. This conceptual paper consists of a systematic reflection on what kinds of archetypical patterns systems can show, and in what kinds of cases these patterns could occur. Agent-based models are used to exemplify each pattern. We present a classification of the breadth of...

Phasing out support schemes for renewables in neighbouring countries: An agent-based model with investment preferences

Support schemes have been central to the expansion of renewable electricity globally and in the European Union. As technologies mature, individual member states may decide to phase out these policies. While previous research has shown that such policy changes affect investors’ decisions, we investigate how they affect pathways and electricity...

Linking of a multi-country discrete choice experiment and an agent-based model to simulate the diffusion of smart thermostats

In this paper, we link findings from a demographically representative discrete choice experiment (DCE) in eight European countries on the adoption of smart thermostats with an agent-based model (ABM) in a methodologically consistent way. We employ the ABM to simulate the diffusion pattern of smart thermostats until 2030 and to examine the...

Using Machine Learning for Agent Specifications in Agent-Based Models and Simulations: A Critical Review and Guidelines

Agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS), whether simple toy models or complex data-driven ones, is regularly applied in various domains to study the system-level patterns arising from individual behaviour and interactions. However, ABMS still faces diverse challenges such as modelling more representative agents or improving computational...

Towards reusable building blocks for agent-based modelling and theory development

Despite the increasing use of standards for documenting and testing agent-based models (ABMs) and sharing of open access code, most ABMs are still developed from scratch. This is not only inefficient, but also leads to ad hoc and often inconsistent implementations of the same theories in computational code and delays progress in the...