5.1) ODD Protocol: Introduction

One of the problems with complex models in general, and agent-based modelling in particular, is how to communicate the key elements and procedures of the models, without having to go through all the code. Communicating your method is important for scientific publication but also for reproduction of the results. Some of the milestone models in agent-based modelling have for a long time not been reproduced, and their results, therefore, have been seen as interesting and new but not yet as robust and proven findings.

Based on a chapter on formulating and communicating ABMs’ in their book Individual-based Modelling in Ecology, Grimm and Railsback hold a workshop about communicating ABMs’ in 2004 in Bergen. Together with 28 authors they developed the “ODD Protocol”, where ODD stands for Overview, Design concepts, and Details. All 28 authors used the ODD to describe one of their existing ABMs’ to test the suitability if the protocol. The result of this workshop was a first publication in Ecological modelling about the ODD Protocol in 2006, which was updated after a few years of experience in 2010.