Modelling Agents Endowed with Social Practices: Static Aspects

Abstract

To understand societal phenomena through simulation, we need computational variants of socio-cognitive theories. Social Practice Theory has provided a unique understanding of social phenomena regarding the routinized, social and interconnected aspects of behaviour. This paper provides the Social Practice Agent (SoPrA) model that enables the use of Social Practice Theory (SPT) for agent-based simulations. We extract requirements from SPT, construct a computational model in the Unified Modelling Language, verify its implementation in Netlogo and Prot\'eg\'e and show how SoPrA maps on a use case of commuting. The next step is to model the dynamic aspect of SPT and validate SoPrA's ability to provide understanding in different scenario's. This paper provides the groundwork with a computational model that is a correct depiction of SPT, computational feasible and can be directly mapped to the habitual, social and interconnected aspects of a target scenario.