TOWARD A UNIFIED APPROACH TO MODELING AND COMPUTER SIMULATION OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS Part I: Methodology of Model Construction Abel K Mazher KBZ College, PO Box 81856, Al Ain, UAE e-mail: akmazher@emirates.net.ae ABSTRACT Can we rely on a model to understand social phenomena? A reliable model is a necessary step to simulate social systems, and reliability should be discussed through all levels of modeling. There are three levels of modeling: conceptual, specification and computational. A conceptual level describes the model at a high level. Since reliability is an important aspect of modeling, it should be addressed first on a conceptual level. This paper proposes a theoretical foundation of a unified approach to conceptual modeling of social systems. From the description of the phenomenon, we construct a system that can be used to simulate behavior. The construction follows a systematic procedure to build a complex social system model from basic elements. The dynamics of the complete system is an outcome of the interacting dynamics of the system components. To complete the model the rules of interaction of the system components and the laws that govern the dynamics of each element as well as the entire system must be described. The structure and dynamics are described using the methodology of control and games theories. Reliability, then, is discussed from the suitability of structure and laws to code the social phenomena. This paper consists of three parts. Part I outlines the theoretical foundation of the unified approach of model construction, and research areas for coherent molding of the complete system. Part II shows how much of the published research can be viewed from this unified approach viewpoint. Reliability is associated with the ability of a model to simulate real social phenomena. The application of the approach to specific examples shows how it can be developed from a simple model to a complex one by including more real features that make the model more reliable. Part III outlines simulation issues of elements, subsystems and systems and how to integrate the simulations of elements into the simulation of the system. Part III also, presents research areas in the field of computer simulations. 1. INTRODUCTION Many research efforts have been directed towards investigating social phenomena by using modeling and computer simulation [1]- [16]. This new field of social studies has produced many concepts and definitions like artificial societies, a multi-agents system model, social simulation, emergence theory, connectionist theory [11] and others. Examples of modeling include academic science structure [2], marriage system [14], segregation problems, socio-economic phenomena [4], and other studies [1, 3, 5-13, 15]. In an effort to view the different models and methods in a