Jen Badham – Integration and Implementation Insights

Agent-based modelling for knowledge synthesis and decision support

April 15, 2022June 25, 2019

By Jen Badham

The most familiar models are predictive, such as those used to forecast the weather or plan the economy. However, models have many different uses and different modelling techniques are more or less suitable for specific purposes.

Here I present an example of how a game and a computerised agent-based model have been used for knowledge synthesis and decision support.

The game and model were developed by a team from the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), a French agricultural research organisation with an international development focus. The issue of interest was land use conflict between crop and cattle farming in the Gnith community in Senegal (D’Aquino et al. 2003).

Sharing mental models is critical for interdisciplinary collaboration

November 30, 2022September 19, 2017

By Jen Badham and Gabriele Bammer

What is a mental model? How do mental models influence interdisciplinary collaboration? What processes can help tease out differences in mental models?

Mental models

Let’s start with mental models. What does the word ‘chair’ mean to you? Do you have an image of a chair, perhaps a wooden chair with four legs and a back, an office chair with wheels, or possibly a comfortable lounge chair from which you watch television?

Choosing a model: If all you have is a hammer…

August 24, 2022June 2, 2016

By Jen Badham

As a modeller, I often get requests from research or policy colleagues along the lines of ‘we want a model of the health system’. It’s relatively easy to recognise that ‘health system’ is too vague and needs explicit discussion about the specific issue to be modelled. It is much less obvious that the term ‘model’ also needs to be refined. In practice, different modelling methods are more or less appropriate for different questions. So how is the modelling method chosen?