Advances in Social Simulation 2015

This text highlights recent developments in the field, presented at the Social Simulation 2015 conference in Groningen, The Netherlands. It covers advances both in applications and methods of social simulation. Societal issues addressed range across complexities in economic systems, opinion dynamics and civil violence, changing mobility patterns, different land-use, transition in the energy system, food production and consumption, ecosystem management and historical processes. Methodological developments cover how to use empirical data in validating models in general, formalization of behavioural theory in agent behaviour, construction of artificial populations for experimentation, replication of models, and agent-based models that can be run in a web browser.