Paul Chapron

Impact of Tenacity upon the Behaviors of Social Actors

The Sociology of the Organized Actions is a well-established theory that focuses upon the actual behaviors of the members of social organizations, and reveals the (to a large extent implicit) motives of social actors. The formalization of this theory leads to model the structure of an organization as a social game, including the Prisoners’ Dilemma as a specific case. In order to perform simulations of social organizations modeled in this way, the SocLab environment contains an algorithm allowing the model’s actors to play the social game and so to determine how they could cooperate with each other. This algorithm includes several parameters, and we study the influence of one of them, the Tenacity.

A Modular Modelling Framework for Hypotheses Testing in the Simulation of Urbanisation

In this paper, we present a modelling experiment developed to study systems of cities and processes of urbanisation in large territories over long time spans. Building on geographical theories of urban evolution, we rely on agent-based models to 1) formalise complementary and alternative hypotheses of urbanisation and 2) explore their ability to simulate observed patterns in a virtual laboratory. The paper is therefore divided into two sections : an overview of the mechanisms implemented to represent competing hypotheses used to simulate urban evolution; and an evaluation of the resulting model structures in their ability to simulate—efficiently and parsimoniously—a system of cities (between 1000 and 2000 cities in the Former Soviet Union) over several periods of time (before and after the crash of the USSR). We do so using a modular framework of model-building and evolutionary algorithms for the calibration of several model structures. This project aims at tackling equifinality in systems dynamics by confronting different mechanisms with similar evaluation criteria. It enables the identification of the best-performing models with respect to the chosen criteria by scanning automatically the parameter space along with the space of model structures (the different combinations of mechanisms).

Compte rendu d’une recherche interdisciplinaire entre sociologues et informaticiens. De la sociologie de l’action organisée au logiciel SocLab

We report a collaboration between sociologists and computer scientists about the formalization of a well-experienced theory, the sociology of the organized action. After a brief introduction to this theory, the paper presents our formalization of this theory and a sample example of its application. The following sections address the validity of the results obtained in this way, the scientific outcomes and the requirements of an interdisciplinary collaboration between sociologists and computer scientists.

La coopération des acteurs sociaux: Un algorithme de simulation pour la négociation de leurs comportements

The Sociology of the Organized Action is a well-established theory that seeks to explain the actual behaviors of the members of social organizations, behaviors that often deviate from the rules prescribed by the organization. Based on a formalization of this theory that led to model the structure of an organization as a multi-agents system, we give a simulation algorithm that show how an organization may be regulated by the adjusting of every actors behavior towards others. To the extent that the organizations structure favors cooperation, the actors cooperate and thus obtain the means to achieve their own goals, even if they have few information.