Scale and Topology Effects on Agent-Based Simulation: A Trust-Based Coalition Formation Case Study

Abstract

The exploitation of Agent-Based Social Simulation (ABSS) full capabilities often requires massive computing power and tools in order to support the achievement of breakthrough results in social sciences. Lately, this issue has being addressed by the release of several high-performance computing agent-based simulation tools; however, they have not been used for exploring critical issues, such as ABSS results invariance and universality. Hence, in order to advance this topic, this chapter provides an invariance analysis, considering scale and topology, of a model that incorporates the concepts of trust and coalition formation, in which agents are placed on a square lattice interacting locally with their neighbors and forming coalitions. By varying the environment size, its topology, as well as the neighborhood topology, it is identified in the experimental scenario that apparently the only parameter that affects the simulation dynamics is the neighborhood topology.