Carnegie Mellon University

CASOS Center

Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems

CASOS Center

Construct

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-LITE and so take as input actual or hypothetical networks and output from Construct can be assessed with ORA.

More Information on Construct

 

 

Version Date Description
5.4.0 - Current Build May 20, 2017 This fixes the bugs with Forgetting and Binary Task Accuracy.
It also includes Communication Mediums, which is the new way that agents will transfer information between each other. Instead of information instantly transferring between agents, now the agents will select a medium to use. The medium can be things like face-to-face, Twitter, email, mail, Facebook, etc. Depending on how the mediums are configured, the information may be attenuated or restricted in some way. The mediums also can cause a delay in the transfer of the information.
4.2 February 15, 2012  
4.1 April 12, 2010 Decision model added.
3.2 September 26, 2007 New Graph and Node management code. Construct is now modularized into different "models".
3.1 July 11, 2007 New BoxGenerator for loading from CSV files was added.
3.0 May 14, 2007 Mail interaction mode was introduced. More BoxGenerator features were added. Support for reading and writing to sql databases was added. Dynamic Environment was added. XML input system was redone.
2.0.08 June 22, 2005 BoxGenerator was introduced with this release. BoxGenerator is used to build up complex network generators from simple "box generators". Instead of simply specifying a single generator for a network, now a user could specify different generators for different parts of the network.
2.0.01 August 2, 2004
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0452487

The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Army Research Lab, NASA, the National Science Foundation or the U.S. government.

  • Construct User Guide: Dipple, Stephen & Carley, Kathleen M. (2023). Construct User Guide 2023. Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Software and Societal Systems Department Technical Report, [pdf]
  • API Documentation