Exploring the Implications of Time in Discrete Event Social Simulations

Representing human behavior and cognition, from individuals to societies, presents a range of chal-lenges to the modeling and simulation community. A common thread through many of these challenges is formulating an authentic representation of time. Many of the issues related to time representation, from the sequencing of cognitive decision processes and information processing, to communication and interaction between agents, to the longer term time scales associated with ideas such as belief revision, remain open research areas throughout the commu-nity. The inherent variability between human sub-jects makes generalization difficult even with data from designed experiments. Discrete event simula-tion (DES) provides a well-documented alternative to time-step simulation and shows potential for ap-plications across the domain of human behavior rep-resentation. This paper provides an overview of a modular discrete event framework for social simula-tion, along with the social and behavioral theories underlying the currently implemented modules. We discuss the practical challenges presented by time in the representation of human cognition, and provide a case study analysis of the output of the discrete event social simulation