The effect of moving agents on the network formation in smart-city applications

Gergely Kocsis, Imre Varga
Department of Informatics Systems and Networks, Faculty of Informatics, University of Debrecen, PO Box 400, 4002 Derecen, Hungary
COMPUTER MODELLING & NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2019 23(1) 44-49

Agent based simulation has an ever-increasing popularity between simulation methods since the actual evolution of the technology now allows scientists to run even really complex simulations using these techniques. However simplification of models is still a key point when running these simulations. Even though our resources seem to be infinite at the first sight one can soon find the limitations in case of modelling such complex systems as e.g. smart city scenarios. In these simulations usually the model contains a set of moving agents that may be connected to each other forming an evolving network. When the interaction of these agents is studied authors usually can choose from two options. i.) Get the network topology at a given point of time and run e.g. information spreading simulations on this constant network or ii.) run the simulations while moving the agents in the same time. This paper tries to reveal in what scenarios it is necessary to count with the evolution of the network and in what cases is it enough to make a snapshot of the network decreasing the needed amount of resources while having almost similar results.