Considering a Multi-level Model as a Society of Interacting Models: Application to a Collective Motion Example
Résumé
As they involve relationships between interacting individuals and groups, social systems can be described at different levels of resolution. In numerous modeling cases, only one of these levels is explicitly represented. In order to study phenomena where both individual and collective representations are needed, multi-level modeling is a good approach as it explicitly represents these different levels. We propose to consider a multi-level representation from a multi-modeling point of view. This perspective allows explicitly specifying the level’s relationships and, therefore, to test hypotheses about interaction between individuals and groups in social systems. We define a framework to better specify the concepts used in multi-level modeling and their relationships. This framework is implemented through the Agent & Artifact for Multi-Modeling meta- model, which benefits from a middleware layer. This meta-model uses the multi-agent paradigm to consider a multi-model as a society of interacting models. We extend this meta-model to consider multi-level modeling, and present a proof of concept of a collective motion example where we show the advantages of this approach for the study of social phenomena.