---
id: media/agent-based-modelling-and-geographical-information-systems
about:
  label: Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems
  description: >-
    A practical primer from Crooks, Malleson, Manley and Heppenstall, 2019, on
    building agent-based models of people in places and linking them to GIS,
    with worked examples in NetLogo.
  tags:
    - agent-based
    - gis
    - netlogo
    - textbook
    - practical
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Andrew Crooks
    - Nick Malleson
    - Ed Manley
    - Alison Heppenstall
  publisher: SAGE Publications
  year: 2019
  isbn: '9781473958654'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20522296W'
domains:
  - places
  - people
  - mobility
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/alison-heppenstall
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/andrew-crooks
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: >-
        Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems: A Practical
        Primer - Andrew Crooks, Nicolas Malleson, Ed Manley, Alison Heppenstall
        - Google Books
      url: 'https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9781473958654'
    - title: 'Open Library: Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20522296W'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
The book goes from first principles to working spatial models. An agent-based model simulates many individual actors, such as people, each following its own rules. GIS is software for storing and mapping geographic data. The book opens with geographical modelling and the basics of GIS, including QGIS. Later chapters cover designing and building agent-based models, calibrating and validating them, and representing human behaviour. The examples are built in NetLogo, with code on a companion site. By the end a reader should be able to build a model of their own and use it to start a research project.

It is the hands-on companion to an edited Springer volume by some of the same authors. Starting from a shapefile (a common file format for map data) and a question, it gets to a running model with people as agents. The chapters on calibration and validation cover steps most twin projects skip.

Cover via Open Library.