Future Developments in Geographical Agent-Based Models: Challenges and Opportunities

Despite reaching a point of acceptance as a research tool across the geographical and social sciences, there remain significant methodological challenges for agent-based models. These include recognizing and simulating emergent phenomena, agent representation, construction of behavioral rules, and calibration and validation. While advances in individual-level data and computing power have opened up new research avenues, they have also brought with them a new set of challenges. This article reviews some of the challenges that the field has faced, the opportunities available to advance the state-of-the-art, and the outlook for the field over the next decade. We argue that although agent-based models continue to have enormous promise as a means of developing dynamic spatial simulations, the field needs to fully embrace the potential offered by approaches from machine learning to allow us to fully broaden and deepen our understanding of geographical systems.