Snyder, J R, Stephenson, L C, Mackie, J E and Smith, S D (2016) Agent-Based Modelling And The Byzantine: Understanding the Construction of Antiquity's Largest Infrastructure Project. In: P W Chan and C J Neilson (Eds.) Proceedings of the 32 nd Annual ARCOM Conference, 5-7 September 2016, Manchester, UK, Association of Researchers in Construction Management, Vol 2, 963-972. AGENT-BASED MODELLING AND THE BYZANTINE: UNDERSTANDING THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTIQUITY'S LARGEST INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT J Riley Snyder 1 , Lucy C Stephenson, Jan E Mackie and Simon D Smith School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, William Rankine Building, King's Buildings, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JL, UK Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) is an established method for simulating the actions, interactions and behaviours of autonomous agents. These agents can be individuals or collective organisations and the tool is able to assess the effects of these agents on the system as a whole. Based on theories of emergence and computational sociology, the ideas behind ABM were first developed many years ago but computational power of recent decades has allowed their utility to provide success in areas such as pollution, transmission of disease, culture, effective teams and cognition. Research is not yet widespread in the construction field, but successes have been seen in areas such as supply chain and network management. The aims of this paper are twofold. We ultimately intend to demonstrate the applicability of ABM in construction management and archaeological engineering; but initially we will outline its potential use via an overview of the Byzantine Water Supply system for the ancient city of Constantinople. Unlike similar counterparts in Classical Antiquity, the Eastern Roman Empire’s 4 th - and 5 th -century water supply megaprojects, whose channels and bridges spanned hundreds of kilometres to bring fresh water to the burgeoning capital of Constantinople and its complex system of reservoirs and cisterns, is relatively under-explored. The paper demonstrates that ABM is able to provide greater and richer understanding of the use of resources in these ancient constructions. Keywords: agent-based modelling, archaeological engineering, byzantine, heritage engineering, project management. INTRODUCTION The work of the modern construction manager, or construction management academic, concerns the ability and resourcefulness of society to provide for its needs via the built environment. We are concerned and interested in aspects such as value for money, project quality, care for the worker, sustainability etc. and investigate how these can be theoretically understood and continually improved. We forget, however, that these needs are not new and that the ability of the built environment to meet the demands of a civil society has been an area of significant interest for centuries, if not millennia. We have two primary aims to cover in this paper: we shall briefly outline the nature of the infrastructure project built in the 4 th and 5 th centuries AD and the overall archaeological engineering research project that is currently investigating it; and we 1 Riley.Snyder@ed.ac.uk