DEVS modelling and simulation of human social interaction and influence

The social influence is at the centre of consideration in social science. In industrial engineering, although the enterprise has reached the age of the electronic communication, the human direct communication is not sufficiently considered even if it remains critical communication vector to transmit information. The idea is to predict some human attributes behaviour that will help enterprise to make efficient decision. The research in the domain gives significant results but the impact of information on individuals within a social network is, mostly, statically modelled where the dynamic aspect is not frequently tackled. The individual׳s reaction to a change within an organisation or ecosystem (implementation of a new system, new security instructions…etc.) is not always rationale. The opinion of individuals is influenced by information gathered about the attributes of the technology from other members of their social network. In addition, the works about modelling and simulation of the population's reactions to an event do not use explicit specification languages to support their models. A behavioural specification model is one critical missing link. Adding a clear behavioural model can help for specification verification and reuse. From literature, the DEVS formalism (Discrete EVent system Specifications) appears to be general enough to represent such dynamical systems (Zeigler et al., 2000). It provides operational semantics applicable to this domain. The contributions of this work are dynamic models of individuals using low-level language to simulate the propagation of information among a group of individuals and its influence on their behaviour. In more detail, we define a set of models of individuals characterized by a set of state variables and the mesh between the individuals within a social network. Then, we introduce the information diffusion based on epidemic spreading algorithms and we transpose them into the case of the message propagation in a social network. Finally, a basic scenario is used to give a beginning of validation to our models using a platform based on DEVS formalism.