Coupling Agent-Based Models and Argumentation Framework to Simulate Opinion Dynamics: Application to Vegetarian Diet Diffusion

Abstract

Agent-based simulation has been extensively used to study opinion dynamics. However, the vast majority of the existing models have been limited to extremely abstract and simplified representations of the diffusion process, which impairs the realism of the simulations and disables the understanding of the reasons for the shift of an actor’s opinion. This paper presents a generic framework implemented in the GAMA platform allowing to explicitly represent exchanges of arguments between actors in a context of an opinion dynamic model. More precisely, we propose to formalize the inner attitude towards an opinion of each agent as an argumentation graph and give them the possibility to share arguments with other agents. We present an application of the framework to study the evolution of the vegetarian diet at a city level.