Agent Based Simulation of Group Emotions Evolution and Strategy Intervention in Extreme Events

Bo Li,Duoyong Sun,Zihan Lin,Shuquan Guo

doi:10.1155/2014/464190

Abstract

Agent based simulation method has become a prominent approach in computational modeling and analysis of public emergency management in social science research. The group emotions evolution, information diffusion, and collective behavior selection make extreme incidents studies a complex system problem, which requires new methods for incidents management and strategy evaluation. This paper studies the group emotion evolution and intervention strategy effectiveness using agent based simulation method. By employing a computational experimentation methodology, we construct the group emotion evolution as a complex system and test the effects of three strategies. In addition, the events-chain model is proposed to model the accumulation influence of the temporal successive events. Each strategy is examined through three simulation experiments, including two make-up scenarios and a real case study. We show how various strategies could impact the group emotion evolution in terms of the complex emergence and emotion accumulation influence in extreme events. This paper also provides an effective method of how to use agent-based simulation for the study of complex collective behavior evolution problem in extreme incidents, emergency, and security study domains.

Highlights

Understanding how the group emotion develops in extreme events is a critical issue in emergency management
This paper focuses on the group extreme incidents, which are caused by human or organization planning
We have specified the mathematical description of the problem, the research framework of this study, the emotional dynamics of agents, the models used for simulation, and the intervention strategies with nine specific criteria for effectiveness evaluation

Summary

Introduction

Understanding how the group emotion develops in extreme events is a critical issue in emergency management. Public emergency always occurs with rumors propagating, malicious incitement, and emotion infection, which cause group emotion changing or even extreme behavior [1, 2]. As a public security incident, extreme group incident is different from general mass incidents in the information propagation manners [3], in which the violence activity information is spreading on the relation network in a relatively private way, such as in the Urumqi incident (Xinjiang, China, 2009) [4]. The group behavior and extreme emotion are hard to detect, which makes it difficult for the strategy formulation and evaluation. The covert information spreading and related group emotion evolution modeling and analysis become important for incident process understanding and intervention strategy evaluation

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