A new paper titled Using Pattern-oriented Modeling (POM) to Cope with Uncertainty in Multi-scale Agent-based Models of Land Change may be of interest to this community.
The article is available with open access here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12012/full
This paper extends the POM approach to land change modeling and lays the groundwork for explicitly modeling cross-scale influences on individual land-users’ decision-making processes.
“Local land-use and -cover changes (LUCCs) are the result of both the decisions and actions of individual land-users, and the larger global and regional economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts in which land-use systems are embedded. However, the dearth of detailed empirical data and knowledge of the influences of global/regional forces on local land-use decisions is a substantial challenge to formulating multi-scale agent-based models (ABMs) of land change. Pattern-oriented modeling (POM) is a means to cope with such process and parameter uncertainty, and to design process-based land change models despite a lack of detailed process knowledge or empirical data. POM was applied to a simplified agent-based model of LUCC to design and test model relationships linking global market influence to agents’ land-use decisions within an example test site. Results demonstrated that evaluating alternative model parameterizations based on their ability to simultaneously reproduce target patterns led to more realistic land-use outcomes. This framework is promising as an agent-based virtual laboratory to test hypotheses of how and under what conditions driving forces of land change differ from a generalized model representation depending on the particular land-use system and location.”