High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Agent-based models have many applications in biology, primarily due to the characteristics of the modeling method. Agent-based modeling is a rule-based, computational modeling methodology that focuses on rules and interactions among the individual components or the agents of the system. The goal of this modeling method is to generate populations of the system components of interest and simulate their interactions in a virtual world. Agent-based models start with rules for behavior and seek to reconstruct, through computational instantiation of those behavioral rules, the observed patterns of behavior. Several of the characteristics of agent-based models important to biological studies include: