A distributed agent-based approach for interdisciplinary collaboration

The unpredicted growth and high user acceptance of social networks motivates the need for powerful and flexible modeling tools that can support analysis and further improvement of these platforms. In this paper we introduce an agent-based distributed modeling framework that is capable of simultaneously simulating and emulating user behaviour in social networks. This framework is independent of the underlying technology and can thus be utilized to study dynamic behaviour in a variety of settings. It constitutes a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration based on its technological conception, which is outlined in this paper together with a first proof-of-concept trial in context with a large social network in Southern America.