scholarly journals DESIGNING A BDI AGENT REACTANT MODEL OF BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE INTERVENTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 78 (2-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ojeniyi Adegoke ◽  
Azizi Ab Aziz ◽  
Yuhanis Yusof

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is well suited for describing agent’s mental state. The BDI of an agent represents its motivational stance and are the main determinant of agent’s actions. Therefore, explicit understanding of the representation and modelling of such motivational stance plays a central role in designing BDI agent with successful behavioural change interventions. Nevertheless, existing BDI agent models do not represent agent’s behavioural factors explicitly. This leads to a gap between design and implementation where psychological reactance has being identified as the cause of BDI agent behavioural change interventions failure. Hence, this paper presents a generic representation of BDI agent model based on behavioural change and psychological theories. Also, using mathematical analysis the model was evaluated. The objective of the proposed BDI agent model is to bridge the gap between agent design and implementation for successful agent-based interventions. The model will be realized in an agent-based application that motivates children towards oral hygiene. The study explicitly depicts how agent’s behavioural factors interact to enhance behaviour change which will assist agent-based intervention designers to be able to design intervention that will be void of reactance.

Author(s):  
Chang-Hyun Jo ◽  

Agent-based programming has been emerged as a next generation programming paradigm. There are many different definitions and usage for agents. In our research, however, an agent is defined as an autonomous, concurrent and intelligent object. Furthermore, our agents are modeled by the belief-desire-intention (BDI) concept. An agent is embodied when it is assigned to its BDI. We call it a BDI agent. A software process defines a set of activities and associated artifacts that lead to the construction of a software system. We have developed a software process based on the BDI agent model that is useful for a systematic development of BDI agent-based software construction. We named our process as the BDI Agent-based Software Process (BDI ASP). This paper presents a new way of modeling technique in our BDI ASP. This work will convince us that the BDI ASP is very sound and practicable in agent software construction. We will provide a few examples as a case study with brief explanations of activities and artifacts in our process.


Author(s):  
Julius M Bañgate ◽  
Julie Dugdale ◽  
Elise Beck ◽  
Carole Adam

Human behaviour during crisis evacuations is social in nature. In particular, social attachment theory posits that proximity of familiar people, places, objects, etc., promotes calm and a feeling of safety, while their absence triggers panic or flight. In closely bonded groups such as families, members seek each other and evacuate as one. This makes attachment bonds necessary in the development of realistic models of mobility during crises. This article presents a review of evacuation behaviour, theories on social attachment, crisis mobility, and agent-based models. It was found that social attachment influences mobility in the different stages of evacuation (pre, during and post). Based on these findings, a multi-agent model of mobility during seismic crises (SOLACE) is being developed, and it is implemented using the belief, desire and intention (BDI) agent architecture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonatan Almagor ◽  
Stefano Picascia

AbstractA contact-tracing strategy has been deemed necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19 following the relaxation of lockdown measures. Using an agent-based model, we explore one of the technology-based strategies proposed, a contact-tracing smartphone app. The model simulates the spread of COVID-19 in a population of agents on an urban scale. Agents are heterogeneous in their characteristics and are linked in a multi-layered network representing the social structure—including households, friendships, employment and schools. We explore the interplay of various adoption rates of the contact-tracing app, different levels of testing capacity, and behavioural factors to assess the impact on the epidemic. Results suggest that a contact tracing app can contribute substantially to reducing infection rates in the population when accompanied by a sufficient testing capacity or when the testing policy prioritises symptomatic cases. As user rate increases, prevalence of infection decreases. With that, when symptomatic cases are not prioritised for testing, a high rate of app users can generate an extensive increase in the demand for testing, which, if not met with adequate supply, may render the app counterproductive. This points to the crucial role of an efficient testing policy and the necessity to upscale testing capacity.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (14) ◽  
pp. 4873
Author(s):  
Biao Xu ◽  
Minyan Lu ◽  
Hong Zhang ◽  
Cong Pan

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a group of sensors connected with a wireless communications infrastructure designed to monitor and send collected data to the primary server. The WSN is the cornerstone of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. Robustness is an essential characteristic of WSN that enables reliable functionalities to end customers. However, existing approaches primarily focus on component reliability and malware propagation, while the robustness and security of cascading failures between the physical domain and the information domain are usually ignored. This paper proposes a cross-domain agent-based model to analyze the connectivity robustness of a system in the malware propagation process. The agent characteristics and transition rules are also described in detail. To verify the practicality of the model, three scenarios based on different network topologies are proposed. Finally, the robustness of the scenarios and the topologies are discussed.


2008 ◽  
Vol 11 (07) ◽  
pp. 717-737 ◽  
Author(s):  
HARBIR LAMBA ◽  
TIM SEAMAN

We continue an investigation into a class of agent-based market models that are motivated by a psychologically-plausible form of bounded rationality. Some of the agents in an otherwise efficient hypothetical market are endowed with differing tolerances to the tension caused by being in the minority. This herding tendency may be due to purely psychological effects, momentum-trading strategies, or the rational response to perverse marketplace incentives. The resulting model has the important properties of being both very simple and insensitive to its small number of fundamental parameters. While it is most certainly a caricature market, with only boundedly rational traders and the globally available information stream being modeled directly, other market participants and effects are indirectly replicated. We show that all of the most important "stylized facts" of real market statistics are reproduced by this model. Another useful aspect of the model is that, for certain parameter values, it reduces to a standard efficient-market system. This allows us to isolate and observe the effects of particular kinds of non-rationality. To this end, we consider the effects of different asymmetries in agent behavior and show that one in particular leads to skew statistics consistent with those seen in some real financial markets.


2018 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-566
Author(s):  
Yong Liu

A few cities and provinces in China have implemented vertical administrative integration of environmental monitoring to the provincial level as a response to severe environmental pollution. This study used an adaptive agent-based simulation model to explore whether the reform might effectively motivate polluting industrial firms to improve their environmental behaviour. Simulation results found that the reform might not effectively motivate the desired improvements in environmental behaviour unless policy-makers improve individual enterprises’ financial capacities, enhance their subsidies, and encourage managers to improve their environmental awareness. These findings could be used in the vertical administrative reform efforts to help achieve the reform’s success. Points for practitioners The vertical reform needs to be sufficiently systematic across its governmental structure because it cannot operate in isolation. It is a part of the country’s complex economic, social, and environmental societal system. Combining administrative restructuring with regulation of micro-agents’ behaviour might increase the reform’s likelihood of success, and financial policies might improve preventive/enthusiastic environmental behaviour. A sophisticated policy approach, such as encouraging preventive/enthusiastic environmental behaviour through business opportunities, might ease behavioural change.


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