Mobility and Information Flow: Percolation in a Multi-Agent Model

Abstract

In real world situations, each person is generally in contact with only a small fraction of the entire population and exchange information through these interactions. Their number and their frequency vary from one to another individual and may be much depending on mobility of individuals. The objective of this article is to better understand how human mobility may have an impact on mobile social networking systems. This should help to answer a question as: “How might an information, a rumor, a pathogen, etc., driven by physical proximity, spread through a population?”. We present a first stage of our work in which we focus on percolation processes as information flow mechanisms. We propose a synthetic mobility model and we define an artificial world populated by heterogeneous agents who differ in their mobility. Simulations are conducted on a multi-agent programmable environment. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate positive correlations between agent mobility factors and percolation thresholds.