Spatial Dynamics of Human Populations:  Some Basic Models

Robert A. Hanneman
(robert.hanneman@ucr.edu)

Department of Sociology
University of California, Riverside

2005

For a translation in French by Kate Bondereva please see:  http://www.autoteiledirekt.de/science/dynamique-spatiale-des-populations-humaines-certains-models-de-base


Introduction



The problem

This small project grew out of my frustration in trying to integrate my early work, based on self-training in "systems dynamics," with newer and emerging work based on "complex systems" and "agent-based" modeling.

"Systems dynamics" is a particular "school" of social science approaches to the application of non-linear differential equation modeling.  This tradition has a rich tool-kit for understanding, by modeling and simulation experiments, systems that tend to be fairly complicated in terms of numbers of variables and complicated functional relations among them.  But, the tradition has a strong bias towards conceiving problems as "closed systems," and the thinking is largely "top-down."

In recent years, more of the social science modeling community has become engaged with "agent-based" approaches, linked closely to the growth of interest in "complexity" and "emergence."  Models of this general type are "bottom-up" and see macro patterns as emerging out of the bounded and locally directed actions of numbers of coupled actors.  The actors (or sub-systems, or agents) are usually approached as minimally complex in themselves (often limited to having one or two categorical attributes and simple action rules).  The complex dynamic behavior of is the consequence of the coupling topology of the agents.

At the most basic level, there is no difference between the two approaches.  "Systems" are often usefully treated as composed of multiple interacting "sub-systems."  That is, many systems models are not first-order, and can (and do) display complex dynamics.  Similarly, one can easily think of agents as "sub-systems."  Which emphasis is most useful is likely to depend on the problem;  agent models tend to give us better leverage over problems dealing with emergence (and possibly evolution) of coupling topology; systems models tend to give us better leverage over understanding the range-of-motion and historical dynamics types of problems.

As a macro-sociologist, my primary interests are in the dynamics and evolution of moderately large scale systems (communities, organizations, classes, societies).  It is usually the case that "agents" of these types need to have fairly large numbers of attributes (variables), and often rather complicated (non-linear, lagged, contingent) rules that describe their behavior.  Those needs pre-dispose the macro-modeler to a systems approach.  But, it is also very clear that the coupling of multiple interacting macro agents is critical (my other main field of study is social networks).  The dynamics of communities are affected by their adjacency to other communities; the internal dynamics of nation states are affected by the way that they are embedded in systems with other nation states.  There are often moderately large numbers of agents in explicit macro-models, and the topologies of their coupling can be complex.  These sorts of issues pre-dispose the modeler to agent-based approaches.

In the models that are developed in this text, we begin to bring together the two traditions together, as they apply to macro-sociological dynamics.  We will work with several macro theories relating to demographic, ecological, and political economic processes.  These theories are expressed as non-linear differential equation models describing the internal dynamics of an agent.  We will then couple a number of these complex agents into a macro system.  We conceive of the coupling of agents as "spatial," and consequently also draw some direction from physical systems modeling traditions in ecology and geography.  Models of social dynamics, however, require flexible and multiple conceptions of "space."  Most notably, social network analysis provides ways of conceptualizing the coupling typologies of complex social systems in ways that may be thought of as "social space."  

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Social science issues

The distances between, and connections among social actors (people, families, communities, organizations, sub-populations) are obviously important in conditioning many forms of social action.  In many areas of the social sciences, distance and connection regularly figure into models of dynamics (E.g. demography and ecology, network analysis).  Many important theories in the social sciences, though, pay remarkably little attention to space - or treat space as an annoying "disturbance."

In many ways, this is like theorizing principles of the dynamics of physical interaction assuming "a perfect vacuum" and "frictionless surfaces."  These are useful assumptions to get at the core theoretical principles, but obvious limitations from a practical engineering point of view.  More troubling is the possibility that ignoring or over-simplifying the distances and connections among social actors is rather like attempting to reduce the dynamics of molecular interaction to the attributes of atoms.  This doesn't work, even in theory.

Assuming that distance doesn't matter in social relations may be reasonable for some dynamics -- if all we seek to understand is theoretical equilibrium outcomes; but distance can matter a great deal for any practical applications of social theories.  But many social phenomena may be embedded in space in ways that can't be ignored, even in the abstract.  The properties and dynamics of social structures may emerge in non-linear ways from the "coupling topology" or "connectedness" of the parts.

Our goal, of course, is useful general theory of social action.  Distance and connection may be boundary conditions or explicit terms in such theories, or they may be core concepts.  To build theories that take distance and connection seriously, a very good strategy is to move back-and-forth between our developing theory and analytic models that are explicitly linked to them.  One goal of the project is to try to bring distance and connection issues more explicitly into some very basic social theories.

This is not a new, or unique enterprise.  There are very large and excellent literatures that do take the role of distance seriously in social dynamics.  We may be add a brick or two to that wall, but the main goal is to try to engage more social scientists to begin to think about, and to play with spatial dynamics in a wider range of sub-fields and applications.

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Technical issues

There are a number of important and useful social-science macro models that do involve multiple complex agents, coupled together (for example:  International Futures).  There are also a number of excellent agent-based models that involve multiple agents (e.g. Sugarscape).  Building models of these types has, until recently, been a major undertaking -- as most such models were developed directly using high-level languages.  Most social scientists (unfortunately) have very limited training in programming and the fairly basic mathematics that are necessary to develop and experiment with either systems or agent models.

Friendly and accessible software tools do exist for both systems modeling (e.g. Stella, Madonna, Vensim, add others) and for agent modeling (e.g. Logo, Swarm, RePast, and others).  Developing models of any complexity in these environments, is tedious, and does require a good bit of learning.  But software work-benches like these do make modeling accessible to most social scientists.  The models that we present in the pages of this site are developed to run in the Berkeley Madonna environment.  The code for the algorithms has been made as simple, transparent, and portable as possible.  The Madonna software environment is available free for viewing models (and is very inexpensive for a full version).   We settled on Madonna as our platform because it has very nice input, output, and graphing tools, a simple syntax for writing programs, useful libraries of functions, and support for one and two dimensional arrays -- which are essential for building spatial models.

What Madonna did not have, that we needed for our application, are tools for handling complex coupling topologies among large numbers of agents.  Our primary contribution at the technical level is that we have developed fairly simple and portable modules of code that can be used to deal with some common coupling topologies necessary for macro-models:  neighborhoods, distances, and network adjacency.  The array handling of Madonna can deal with large numbers of internally complex agents.   We've added some tools for handling some of the coupling together of large numbers of agents.  Our goal is to make it easier to develop models of complex agents embedded in complex spaces, without having to write lots of code.

The code, in Madonna, for all the models in this site are downloadable from the pages of the site.  In most cases, the code itself is quite simple, and we have tried to provide sufficient documentation with comments to understand what the programs are doing.  By using the Madonna environment and just a bit of programming, most models can be stated in surprisingly few lines of code.  Our goal, of course, is to urge you to play with and modify the code in ways that you find interesting and useful.

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Teaching about dynamics

The notion of expressing theories as formal mathematical models of dynamics is commonplace in most of the physical and life sciences.  It is not so common in the social sciences.  This is unfortunate, and can create a sort of a "language barrier" between parts of the scientific community.  But increasing numbers of social scientists are coming to understand, appreciate, and adopt these tools; and there is a continuing flow of personnel and ideas from the physical and life sciences into social science fields and into interdisciplinary efforts such as the Santa Fe Institute.

One of our goals was to increase the stock of fairly easy-to-use tools for teaching about dynamics that "speak to" social scientists.  This is hardly a unique or new goal.  Mathematical social scientists have provided very useful texts from time-to-time (in Sociology, some exemplars are works by Farraro, Leik and Meeker, Coleman, Lave and March).  Hands-on modeling tools and theory-informed teaching simulations have also been around for some time.  A very notable early effort in Sociology is William Sims Bainbridge's Sociology Laboratory.  More recently, several inter-disciplinary modeling communities have made very serious and useful efforts to provide tools and exemplars that speak directly to social science curricula (e.g. Ruth and Hannon's Modeling Dynamic ... Systems volumes, Logo, RePast, and Swarm).

We share with these authors the idea that the toolkit of all social scientists ought to include an appreciation of systems and agent modeling -- even if many social scientists will rarely do their main work using these tools.  By making more tools available that can be used in basic instruction in theory (and maybe particular substantive fields) we hope to further encourage efforts to make work of this type "normal" in the social sciences.  The models here are not a "course."   But they may be  useful in introducing some basic ideas and tools for thinking about the role of distance and connectivity in social science theorizing.  The particular themes of  distance and connection are not a commonplace in existing curriculum support materials for the social sciences (though many of the existing works do address some of the same issues). 

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The simulation models

To be entirely honest, there is no clear single logical order that organizes most of the materials in the pages of this web-site.  Indeed, we hope that more short modules will be developed as interesting problems occur to users who want to share them here.

You will probably want to do two things first, and then sample from the rest as it suits you.

Look through the "Getting started" material on the remainder of this page.  We'll provide some basic information on how to work with the software and models in the other pages.

Then, look at the page on "Single Population Spatial Dynamics."  That page, and the attached models, explain our basic conceptual approach to "space."  It also develops the basic algorithms for handling neighborhoods, distances, and networks that we will apply in the substantive examples on other pages.

Then, if you're still with us, there is no real order.  Each page is intended to deal with a set of closely related issues, but there is no real linear order among the pages themselves.

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Getting started

All of the models that we discuss on the pages in this site can be downloaded (they are all very small files).  They are in .mmd format, and are designed for use with the Berkeley Madonna simulation environment.  You may download a version of Madonna that will enable you to view and experiment with models for free.  To create models, however, you will need to purchase the software (student version is $99).

You can download the software from the Berkeley Madonna website:

http://www.berkeleymadonna.com/

There is a graphic flow-chart editing tool that requires Java to use.  We won't use this tool.

If you want to know more, you may wish to take a look at the user's manual:

Berkeley Madonna User's Manual

The graphic below shows a screen shot of the user interface of the Madonna environment (Windows version).

Models are built and modified in the equation window, and use a fairly natural language.  A considerable library of functions are available.  Results are produced in charts and tables.  Tabular data can be exported.  Our graphic also shows a simulation control window.

The environment has excellent tools for experimenting with models by varying parameters, and doing multiple runs (either for random starting conditions, or to examine the sensitivity of the models across ranges of parameters).

One feature of Madonna is rather useful for the kinds of spatial models that we will be building.  This is the ability to input parameters and initial conditions from external files.  Suppose that we were building a model of the movements of a human population and an animal population over space (the predator-prey model that we'll examine in detail on another page).  We will create populations of predators (humans) and prey in each of nine spatial areas, arranged as a square grid.  One might, of course, want to create much larger environments (say 100 by 100).

To provide the values of the number of predators and number of prey in each of the 9 squares at the beginning of the simulation, we could write just a little code in Madonna.  It is probably easier to visualize, and to implement this by building a "map" of the starting values we'd like.  The next figure shows a screen shot of an Excel spreadsheet (notice that the sheet has been saved as a .csv file, not an Excel worksheet).

The first row and column are used to provide index numbers to identify the locations of the nine spatial areas.  The values in the inner cells provide the starting values for (in this case) the number of predators.  In the example, we've indicated as starting population of 1000 predators, all concentrated in the center of the space.  Multiple files are used to initialize multiple variables, as needed.

Once the initial value map has been created, there are two additional steps.  First, a little program code is written to call for the file.  Here's an example.

The first line is a comment.  The second line indicates that we are initializing the variable "pred_tmp" across a two-dimensional array that has the dimensions "begin..end" by "begin..end."  The values of "begin" and "end" are set elsewhere in the program at "1" and "3" (in this case) to create a 3 by 3 grid.  This square array, we tell the program, is to be filled with data from an external file (#) named "pred" (the one we created above).  The external file is to be read with the row (i) and column (j) indexes reversed.  This last little bit is peculiar -- for some reason, Madonna indexes the data array by columns and rows.  We want our external data files to look like the row by column map of the space we are building -- so a translation is needed.

In the example, we also call for another file to initialized the number of prey across the nine grid squares.

Once this code is in place, we need to tell Madonna (you only need to do this once) where to find the data, and to load it.  This is done from the menu File>Import data set.  Use the browser to locate the spreadsheet file, and select it.  
The dialog below will appear.

Since we are importing a set of initial values that we want read as a two-dimensional array, we've selected the radio button "Matrix (2D)."  You can use exactly the same method to import one or more vectors into your model -- which is sometimes useful for setting parameters and other initialization tasks.

Once you've created or opened the model's equations, and loaded the external data files (if any), you can use the tools of the simulation environment to experiment with the model, producing line chart and table output.  The table output can be exported for use in other programs.

Madonna doesn't have a "map" like grid display for output -- this is an unfortunate limitation for the kinds of models that we want to build.  We're still working on this problem, and hope to either make a tool or find one that will allow graphical presentation variables in square matrix form -- preferably with animation.

This is quite enough for now, and enough to get you started.  Look at a few pages of this site, glance through the user's manual.  Look at the code for a few of our models.  I think you'll find that it will not be difficult to learn an master the necessary skills for creating useful models in Madonna, and using it's simulation environment to experiment with them.  We're not promising that it is no work; but we do think that this is much easier than most of the alternatives currently available for building spatial models.

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