Exploring the Implications of Time in Discrete Event Social Simulations

Representing human behavior and cognition, from individuals to societies, presents a range of challenges to the modeling and simulation community. A common thread through many of these challenges is formulating an authentic representation of time. Many of the issues related to time representation, from the sequencing of cognitive decision processes and information processing, to communication and interaction between agents, to the longer term time scales associated with ideas such as belief revision, remain open research areas throughout the community. The inherent variability between human subjects makes generalization difficult even with data from designed experiments. Discrete event simulation (DES) provides a well-documented alternative to time-step simulation and shows potential for applications across the domain of human behavior representation. This paper provides an overview of a modular discrete event framework for social simulation, along with the social and behavioral theories underlying the currently implemented modules. We discuss the practical challenges presented by time in the representation of human cognition, and provide a case study analysis of the output of the discrete event social simulation.