Simulating Burglary - Working Paper

I have just finished a working paper entitled "Simulating Burglary with an Agent-Based Model", available here. It reports some results of my initial burglary prototype. This model uses relatively simple burglar agents and a grid-based virtual environment but is a good introduction to the more complex model that I'm developing for my PhD.

The following video shows an early prototype in action. The burglar agents are yellow and other people (home owners) are blue. Initially some of the burglars go to work in the green area, but often employment doesn't provide them with enough money and they choose to burgle instead. This is a vast simplification of real behaviour and will be improved in later developments, but works well as a proof-of-concept prototype.