From biological to urban cells: lessons from three multilevel agent-based models

Modeling complex systems often implies to consider entities at several levels of organization and levels of scales. Taking into account these levels, their mutual interactions, and the organizational dynamics at the interface between levels, is a difficult problem, for which the proposed solutions are often related to a specific disciplinary field or a particular case study. In order to develop a broader methodology for designing multilevel models, we propose an analytical framework of existing approaches, drawn in particular from the study of three examples in biology and geography.