The SOSIEL Platform: Knowledge-based, cognitive, and multi-agent

This article describes the open-source cognitive multi-agent knowledge-based SOSIEL (Self-Organizing Social & Inductive Evolutionary Learning) Platform, designed for building the social components of social-ecological decision support systems, consisting of agents empowered with a cognitive architecture. The platform can simulate the cross-generational progression of one or a large number of agents that can interact among themselves and/or with coupled natural and/or technical systems, learn from their and each other's experience, create new practices, and make decisions about taking and then take (potentially collective) actions. The platform can also be used for conducting hypothetical experiments that are focused on studying the interactions among: (a) cross-generational population dynamics, (b) self-organizing multi-layered social network structures, (c) evolving place-based knowledge, (d) learning, (e) decision-making, (f) collective action and its potential, and (g) social and (when coupled) social-ecological outcomes. The article describes a simple model that was built with the SOSIEL Platform, which simulates the co-evolution of mental models among socially learning agents.