In July I was invited to a workshop on Agent-based Theory development in Hannover. Reading the participants list felt like the who-is-who in Agent-based modelling. I was super-excited about the event: ABM theory and methods development is my core interest and well – arguably there aren’t too many people, who share this weird passion. The workshop turned out to be an ABM firework! Three days, that could have lasted for three weeks as far as I am concerned.

The domain backgrounds couldn’t have been more diverse than in this group, ranging from human geography, to computer science, economics, and ecology. The single common denominator was the interest in the dynamics of living systems – or better to say, the digital representation thereof, aka “Agent-based modelling”. In my contribution, I provided the spatial view on ABM for which I got great feedback. In turn, I went home with many new insights. And much more new questions. Now, the real work starts and we need to bring some of the high-flying ideas to the ground.

A great big Thank-You to the organising team: first of all Iris Lorscheid together with Matthias Meyer, Volker Grimm and Uta Berger. Thanks to the Volkswagenstiftung for making this possible. Thanks to everybody for a great event!