Dynamic Agent-Based Network Generation

Audren Bouadjio Boulic (1) , Frédéric Amblard (1, 2) , Benoit Gaudou (1)

1 IRIT-SMAC - Systèmes Multi-Agents Coopératifs
2 UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole

Networks are a very convenient and tractable way to model and represent interactions among entities. For example, they are often used in agent-based models to describe agents’ acquaintances. Yet, data on real-world networks are missing or difficult to gather. Being able to generate synthetic but realistic social networks is thus an important challenge in social simulation. In this article, we provide a very comprehensive and modular agent-based process of network creation. We believe that the complexity of ABM (Agent-Based Models) comes from the overall interactions of entities, but they could be kept very simple for better control over the outcome. The idea is to use an agent-based simulation to generate networks: agent behaviors are rules for the network construction. Because we want the process to be dynamic and resilient to nodes perturbation, we provide a way for behaviors to spread among agents, following the meme basic principle - spreading by imitation. Resulting generated networks are compared to a target network; the system automatically looks at the best behavior distribution to generate this specific target network.

Mots clés: Network dynamic; Synthetic network generation; Agent-based modeling

Domaines: Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Modélisation et simulation

Audren Bouadjio Boulic, Frédéric Amblard, Benoit Gaudou. Dynamic Agent-Based Network Generation. 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017), Feb 2017, Porto, Portugal. pp. 599-606. ⟨hal-01740008⟩