Validation of Agent-Based Urban Policy Models by Means of State Space Analysis

Simulation trust is a critical issue to foster e-participation in the new e-governance framework in which it is expected to increase citizen's participation in the design or urban policies. In social science, no firm conclusions have been reached on the appropriate way to verify or validate Agent Based Models, due to several aspects, such as agent capacity to take decisions autonomously. This paper considers some of the difficulties in establishing verification and validation of agent based models, and proposes the use of coloured petri net formalism to specify agent behaviour in order to check if the model looks logical and the model behaves logical. Model plausibility is used to express the conformity of the model with a priori knowledge about the process. The proposed methodology has been applied in the European Future Policy Modelling project (www.fupol.eu) to create trust and increase the credibility of the agent based models developed to foster e-participation in the design of urban policies by means of simulation techniques.