A reasoning model based on human societies

The use of simulation tools for reasoning about human societies formalizes their analysis and reduces the related costs, but it demands a high level of expertise in the design and programming of complex systems. This paper presents the SCAT framework aimed at bringing these tools closer to their end users, the researchers in social sciences. For this purpose, it adopts an approach with domain-specific languages based on the activity theory and the situation calculus. The Activity Theory is a paradigm from social sciences to analyze the behaviour of societies through activity systems, which are groups of tasks performed by actors in a social and historical context. SCAT uses the formalism of the Situation calculus to define an operational semantics for these systems. On this basis, SCAT provides a modelling language to describe interconnected activity systems, and an environment for the simulation of these systems and the verification of their properties. An example on human relations organizes this presentation of SCAT.