Communication and Negotiation to Improve Agent-Based Models

Alejandro Rodríguez-Arias, Noelia Sánchez-Maroño, Bertha Guijarro-Berdiñas

2025

Abstract

Agent-based models (ABM) play a fundamental role in studying and modeling complex real-world systems, primarily relying on reactive agents. Despite their simplicity, the interactions between agents and their environment enable the simulation of diverse systems, contributing to their widespread adoption, particularly in the social sciences. Similarly, though distinct in purpose, multi-agent systems (MAS) are designed to tackle complex, diverse, and distributed problems by leveraging communication, negotiation, and coordination capabilities. Both types of approaches have been used successfully in numerous areas; the power of ABM lies in thousands of interacting agents, while MAS usually employs a smaller number of agents with more capabilities. Including MAS agents’ capabilities in ABM agents allows the generation of more realistic simulations that aid in the study of the modeled systems. In this paper, we present a generic ABM model whose agents possess more capabilities, such as communication and negotiation, allowing this enhanced ABM to address more complex modeling problems. To exemplify the usefulness of this enhanced ABM, we propose to use it as a sandbox-tool to test “case-if” scenarios in a model that studies the evolution of a society’s opinion on a given subject, specifically in this example, the implantation of superblocks in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain).

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Rodríguez-Arias A., Sánchez-Maroño N. and Guijarro-Berdiñas B. (2025). Communication and Negotiation to Improve Agent-Based Models. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART; ISBN 978-989-758-737-5, SciTePress, pages 1388-1395. DOI: 10.5220/0013377500003890

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart25,
author={Alejandro Rodríguez-Arias and Noelia Sánchez-Maroño and Bertha Guijarro-Berdiñas},
title={Communication and Negotiation to Improve Agent-Based Models},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART},
year={2025},
pages={1388-1395},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013377500003890},
isbn={978-989-758-737-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART
TI - Communication and Negotiation to Improve Agent-Based Models
SN - 978-989-758-737-5
AU - Rodríguez-Arias A.
AU - Sánchez-Maroño N.
AU - Guijarro-Berdiñas B.
PY - 2025
SP - 1388
EP - 1395
DO - 10.5220/0013377500003890
PB - SciTePress