Self-organizing social and spatial networks under what-if scenarios

Abstract

Multi-agent models have been used to simulate complex systems in many domains. In some models, the agents move in a physical/grid space and are constrained by their locations on the spatial space, e.g. Sugarscape. In others, the agents interact in a social multi-dimensional space and are bound to their knowledge and social positions, e.g. Construct. However, many real world problems require a mixed model containing both spatial and social features. This paper introduces such a multi agent system, Construct-Spatial, which simulates agent communication and movement simultaneously. It is an extended version of Construct, which is a multi-agent social model, and its extension is based on a multi-agent grid model, Sugarscape. To understand the impact of this integration of the two spaces, we run virtual experiments and compare the output from the combined space to those from each of the two spaces. The initial analysis reveals that the integration facilitates unbalanced knowledge distribution across the agents compared to the grid-only model and limits agent network connections compared to the social network model without spatial constraints. After the comparisons, we setup what-if scenarios where we varied the type of the threats faced by network and observe their emergent behaviors. From the what-if analyses, we locate the best destabilization scenario and find the propagation of the effects from the spatial space to the social network space. We believe that this model can be a conceptual model for assessing the efficiency and the robustness of team deployments, network node distributions, sensor distributions, etc. © 2007 IFAAMAS.