Impact of structuring elements on agents´ behavior in social simulations

Agent-based social simulations have been widely used to help social scientists on the understanding of several social phenomena. Traditional approaches to agents most often tackle well the behavioral and the temporal aspects of the carried out simulations. However, a frequent limitation in social simulations is the lack of simultaneous support for spatial specifications of social structures. That is, the incorporation of placement and neighboring of real world conceptual structuring elements such as houses, hospitals, roads, and workplaces. Moreover, the incorporation of mechanisms that affords assessing means on the action selection of all social agents is deemed also to be seminal. In this paper we use the plausible agents matrix (PAX) framework to investigate the influence of these social structuring elements on the intelligent agents´ behaviors, considering some disease dissemination scenarios. Results obtained show how influential is spatiality (i.e. consideration of the abovementioned structuring elements) on the overall epidemics understanding and sought control. These findings are instrumental for the development of more effective tools to support decision makers, namely the ones who work with health care and other public policies.