Spatiotemporal analysis of an agent-based model of a colony of keratinocytes: a first approach for the development of validation methods

Agent-based models are widely used for the simulation of systems from several domains (biology, economics, meteorology, etc). In biology agent-based models are very useful for predicting the social behaviour of systems; in particular they seem well adapted to model the behaviour of a cell population. In this paper an agent-based model, developed to study normal human keratinocytes (tissue cells), will be investigated. This kind of model exhibits probabilistic behaviour and the validation of simulation results is often done with a qualitative analysis by the experts (biologists). The main objective of this paper is to propose new variables and metrics that allow the comparison and a possible quantitative validation using numerical results from simulations.