The ForagerNet3_Demography (FN3_D) model is a non-spatial ABM for exploring:
* How demographically-relevant behaviors at the person- and household-levels are related to one another in hunter-gatherer systems;
* How those lower-level behaviors are related to system-level demography;
* How the characteristics of assemblages of dead individuals are related to the demographic characteristics of the living population from which those assemblages were drawn.
The model has three main levels: person, household, and system. Inter-related methods represent birth, death, and pair bonding (marriage). Many parameters in the model are continuously variable. The dependency ratio (the ratio of consumers to producers in a household) is a key variable in many economic decisions embedded in the methods.
The FN3_D model is not intended to represent all details of any particular hunter-gatherer system. This was a purposeful strategy to aid in constructing a model whose structure and behavior are understandable and applicable to a range of circumstances.
The FN3_D model is explicitly non-spatial. Investigating the effects of the spatial distribution of population on demography will be the focus of a later version of the ForagerNet3 model. The FN3_D model can be used to explore aspects of hunter-gatherer demography in the absence of spatial effects (and without assuming or accounting for any particular spatial configuration of the population).
FN3_D was built using Repast J. The code for the model is supplied as a text file.
The documentation provides (1) a description of the representations of time and the entities (persons, households, social links) in the model; (2) a brief overview of the major groups of methods in the model (pair bond, reproduction, and mortality); (3) model-level variables, parameters, and lists; and (4) a detailed description of the “rules” and the operations of the model with specific numeric reference to sections of the code.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.comses.net/codebases/3978/releases/1.0.0/