

Construct, developed by CASOS, is a multi-agent model of network evolution.  Social, knowledge and belief networks co-evolve.  Groups and organizations are treated as complex systems thus capturing the variability in human and organizational factors. In Construct individuals and groups interact communicate, learn, and make decisions in a continuous cycle. The program takes into account how agents learn through interaction conducted over different media and change their information, beliefs, and activities based on what they learn. This can be used for forecasting how a network can evolve and seeing if two groups that appear identical on one dimension actually evolve in the same way. The non-linearity of the model generates complex temporal behavior due to dynamic relationships among agents. These dynamic relationships are grounded in constructural theory, structuration theory and influence theory.  Consequently, in Construct,  the socio-cultural system is constructed and reconstructed through human interaction based on rules and resources. The changes in the social system are defined and analyzed through the lens of social network analysis. Construct can be run directly from *ORA and so take as input actual or hypothetical networks and output from Construct can be assessed with *ORA.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0452487.

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