TY - JOUR A1 - Helfmann, Luzie A1 - Djurdjevac Conrad, Natasa A1 - Djurdjevac, Ana A1 - Winkelmann, Stefanie A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - From interacting agents to density-based modeling with stochastic PDEs JF - Communications in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science N2 - Many real-world processes can naturally be modeled as systems of interacting agents. However, the long-term simulation of such agent-based models is often intractable when the system becomes too large. In this paper, starting from a stochastic spatio-temporal agent-based model (ABM), we present a reduced model in terms of stochastic PDEs that describes the evolution of agent number densities for large populations. We discuss the algorithmic details of both approaches; regarding the SPDE model, we apply Finite Element discretization in space which not only ensures efficient simulation but also serves as a regularization of the SPDE. Illustrative examples for the spreading of an innovation among agents are given and used for comparing ABM and SPDE models. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.2140/camcos.2021.16.1 VL - 16 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 32 ER -