Modelling Human Routines: Conceptualising Social Practice Theory for Agent-Based Simulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces the SoPrA framework, a modular agent-based simulation tool grounded in social practice theory, designed to model routines across various social challenges like climate change and healthcare.

Contribution

It presents a domain-independent, conceptually sound, and computationally feasible framework for simulating routines in agent-based models, integrating insights from multiple disciplines.

Findings

Provides a consistent and modular framework for routines

Enhances simulation usability across domains

Aligns with current evidence on social routines

Abstract

Our routines play an important role in a wide range of social challenges such as climate change, disease outbreaks and coordinating staff and patients in a hospital. To use agent-based simulations (ABS) to understand the role of routines in social challenges we need an agent framework that integrates routines. This paper provides the domain-independent Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) framework that satisfies requirements from the literature to simulate our routines. By choosing the appropriate concepts from the literature on agent theory, social psychology and social practice theory we ensure SoPrA correctly depicts current evidence on routines. By creating a consistent, modular and parsimonious framework suitable for multiple domains we enhance the usability of SoPrA. SoPrA provides ABS researchers with a conceptual, formal and computational framework to simulate routines and gain new insights into social systems.