Modeling human behavior - an (id)entity crisis?

Agent-based modeling (ABM) has gained great popularity in recent years, especially in application areas where human behavior is important, because it opens up the possibility of capturing such behavior in great detail. Hybrid models which combine ABM with discrete-event simulation (DES) are particularly appealing in service industry applications. However in this paper we argue that many of the so-called distinctions between agents in an ABM and entities in a DES are artificial, and we describe several DES models which use standard entities to represent agent-like behaviors.