Documenting Social Simulation Models: The ODD Protocol as a Standard

Why Read This Chapter? To learn about the importance of documenting your simulation model and discover a lightweight and appropriate framework to guide you in doing this. 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 individualand agent-based simulationmodels (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 to facilitating its wider adoption and encouraging higher standards in simulation description.

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