Social Systems Engineering

8Using Actor‐Network Theory in Agent‐Based Modelling

Sandra Méndez‐Fajardo, Rafael A. Gonzalez and Ricardo A. Barros‐Castro

8.1 Introduction

Design‐oriented research usually involves modelling for the purposes of representing, exploring or simulating real‐world situations. A widely used approach is agent‐based modelling (ABM); agent‐based models help us to understand or reveal the effects of collective behaviour by representing the rules governing agent decisions and the influence of these decisions on a virtual (or sometimes actual) real‐world environment. A number of different theories guide the design of individual agents, their interactions and the environment on which they act, most of which are focused on representing the currently observed situation or are driven by historical data in order to enable calibration and the interpolation of future scenarios. However, these approaches often lack the in‐depth reconstruction of historical trajectories or fail to capture the dynamics that have led to collective patterns, whether successful or not. Furthermore, most of these strategies treat agents as human actors or institutions, leaving out non‐human actors or treating them as part of a different category, despite the fact that both human and non‐human actors exercise agency, interaction and collective behaviour. Thus, the main research question addressed in this chapter is how to extract key elements from historical trajectories in socio‐technical systems via the identification ...