Migration on sugarscape environment

Abstract

Migration is as old as human history. The reasons and ways of migration are different from each other in different parts of history, but migration exits as a social behavior since the emergence of the first human. Although different disciplines have different types of studies on migration, migration is mainly a topic of social science and it is one of the difficult social behaviors of human to investigate. The work done in this M.S. thesis is the study of migration and migration simulation on sugarscape environment. To understand migration, studies done up to now have been investigated and theories related to the initiation and perpetuation of migration have been analyzed. We also studied models and simulations of migration to be aware of the problems we may face during creating our own model. After these studies some models have been created to simulate migration. After realizing the complex nature of the migration and modeling such a complex social behavior is very difficult in a short time, we thought that we can simulate some part of the whole migration picture. After that we have focused the subject of colonization. We have created two types of agents differ from each other in terms of their capabilities and motivations. The movement dynamics and success ratios of these agent types during colonization have been investigated by the help of simulations.