Agent-based social simulation model that accommodates diversity of human values

People today exchange a great variety of information over the Internet. Much like the world at large, people bring a wide range of values to their interaction with each other as they communicate over the Internet. While the Internet has certainly facilitated social interaction, security measures have become absolutely essential to ensure private information is not compromised or tampering with. These security-related problems are also related to human values, but it is not easy to represent complex human values by conventional agent-based simulation. In this paper, we propose a model of information propagation in social networks using particle swarm optimization (PSO), a type of swarm intelligence algorithm, to simulate how different values affect human interaction. Simulations based on the model reveal that effects on propagation of information are quite different between environments where information is exchanged among agents with the same values and environments where information is exchanged among agents with different values.