Introduction: Agent-Based computational demography

Agent-based computational models have become more and more used in the social sciences. Different to the approach based on statistical analysis the behavioral data that aims to understand why specific rules are applyed to human populations, agent-based computational models presuppose rules of behavior and try to challenge the validity of these rules by showing whether they can or cannot explain macroscopic regularities. In the chapter we argue that in order to study human populations, agent-based approaches are particularly useful from various theoretical perspectives.