Preface

The topics approached by this book have received significant attention in recent years because social researchers can apply new tools in order to investigate social reality. This book presents some latest and representative developments of Applied Computational Mathematics in Social Sciences. It focuses on some major and important problems in agent-based modeling (ABM) used in Social Sciences and provide comprehensive survey of a multi agent-based computational model of an artificial society implemented in NetLogo, a freeware platform available on Internet.

The book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction of the book that gives the essential information to the readers regarding the two major fields approached by the book: Applied Computational Mathematics and Social Sciences. Chapter 2 describes the multi agent-based computational model of the artificial society constructed by using knowledge from the next Social Sciences: Anthropology, Economics, Education, Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, Social Work, and Sociology. Chapter 3 describes the implementation in NetLogo of the multi agent-based model described in the second chapter. Chapter 4 uses the computational model implemented in the third chapter for a set of computational experiments using NetLogo. Chapter 5 presents the conclusions of the computational experiments done in the fourth chapter.

The primary target audiences of this book are those who are interested in using Computational Mathematics in Social Sciences. Typically, they include scholars, researchers, developers and postgraduate students. This book could be a useful reference for university courses in both fields of Applied Computational Mathematics and Social Sciences.