ABSTRACT
As social and economic systems are among the most complex systems in our world, the chapter will mainly deal with applications of simulation in general and agent-based simulation in particular in economics and the social sciences. Thus it will start with a discussion of the predecessors and origins of agent-based simulation mainly, but not only, in these sciences from the time when the first simulation models were created that used, or rather should have used, multi-agent systems. If one accepts that multi-agent systems have objectoriented languages as their prerequisites, one has also to accept that multi-agent systems proper could only be implemented after the early 1980s, but much earlier, namely in the 1960s the first simulations, for instance in political science, were built that can be described as forerunners of multi-agent systems.
