Communication Modeling with Face-to-face Contacts --- A Theoretical Perspective ---

Yoshida for their constant guidance and advice during research. for their warm friendship and constant supports during my three years in Kyoto University. My profound gratitude goes to the Ministry of Education, Sports, and Culture of Japan for providing me with the scholarship to study in Japan for three years. Finally, my deepest sense of gratitude goes to my parents. iii iv Executive Summary Supported by the highly advanced technologies of information/communication and transportation , the new knowledge society has been emerging. Newly developed transportation and communication technologies are diffused in the society, resulting in the rapid increase in the flexibility and the degree of freedom of human communication behaviours. The technological innovation of communications in the society does not only mean more rapid and efficient transmission of information and knowledge, it also expands the possibility of interactions of various types of activities in the spatially distant areas. The increased opportunity of communications in the society, greatly affecting the communication behaviours, brings about the structural evolution of social systems themselves. In most communication behaviours, the decisions made by travel agents cannot be independent of the decision and/or intention of other agents. One's decision on his/her communication behaviour is more or less affected by the others' will. Especially, in face-to-face communication (referred to as 'meetings' hereafter), the agreement with the other party to have a meeting is the prerequisite for the meeting. The study aimed at formulating communication processes with face-to-face contacts. The objectives and scopes of the study were organized into four parts. The first part formulated face-to-face communication processes with agreement for meeting. The second part aimed at developing a theoretical model for communication processes by face-to-face contacts. The third party presented communication model with heterogeneous agent. The fourth part modeled communication processes with bounded memory. In chapter 2, a random matching model was elaborated to characterize bilateral interregional human face-to-face contacts. The bilateral contacts can be realized only when both parties agree to meet each other. Thus, mutual agreement is the core of our contact modeling. Spatial distribution of bilateral contacts can be described as the results of random matching by potential meeting partners. The failure in agreement for meeting is the major source of inefficiency in human contacts among regions. The chapter provided a random matching scheme to describe the generation mechanism of interregional human contacts. The chapter concluded by illustrating some numerical examples showing how changes …