The Project

The idea is to set up a Consortium for the institution of a trans-institutional and interdisciplinary research centre for agent-based social simulation, possibly organized into territorial sections, in which cognitive and social scientists, physicists and biologists, computer scientists and experts in evolutionary systems and complexity can cooperate. The Centre will benefit from the assistance of a consortium among CNR, Universities and other public and private agencies (public entities, private enterprises and credit institutions; see CESSBA web site for the Promoting Committee list) and possibly also foreign organizations. The Centre will have the logistical support, at least at the outset, of the CNR ISTC. It is envisaged that national and international experts will sit on the governing board.

The "mission"

The proposed organization will have several different objectives:

• To boost the visibility of the social simulation sector.
• To represent a pole of attraction also at the international level for skills crucial to the sector's development.
• To enhance communication and synergism among groups that, even when large sized, are scattered around the country.
• To procure resources through (inter)national resource projects and the contribution of a number of external agencies.

These objectives converge towards the following:

• Enhancing of the social simulation sector.
• Innovating methods, problems and tools in all the social sciences (and not just in economics), in the behavioural and psychological sciences, in evolutionary theories and in information technology.
• Focusing attention on several important theory issues regarding the sciences of society and of the mind, for which the contribution of simulation is essential (what are agents, which agents, if, when and why cognition is necessary, what do networks explain, etc.).
• Focusing attention on the demands and problems of society (policy, governance, environment, sustainability, artefacts and their dissemination, etc.).