Representing Dynamic Social Networks in Discrete Event Social Simulation

Proceedings of the 2010 Winter Simulation Conference B. Johansson, S. Jain, J. Montoya-Torres, J. Hugan, and E. Yücesan, eds.One of the key structural components of social systems is the social network. The representation of this network structure is key to providing a valid representation of the society under study. The social science concept of homophily provides a conceptual model of how social networks are formed and evolve over time. Previous work described the results of social simulation using a static homophily network. In order to gain the full benefit of modeling societies a representation of how the social network changes over time is required. This paper introduces the implementation of a dynamic homophily network, along with a case study exploring the sensitivity of model outputs to the parameters describing the network and applying social network change detection methods (SNCD) to model output