An agent-based simulation of extremist network formation through radical behavior diffusion

Carlos Sureda Gutierrez (1) , Frédéric Amblard (1, 2) , Benoit Gaudou (1, 2)

1 IRIT-SMAC - Systèmes Multi-Agents Coopératifs
2 UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole

Understanding how terrorist networks are created and how individuals turn into extremism and then into terrorism is a current subject of interest and a cross-domain research problem since it involves scholars from political sciences, sociology, physics and computer scientists among others. In this paper, an agent-based approach is used to simulate the process of radicalization and creation of a terrorist network, and the link between both processes. Each citizen has several attributes allowing the model to take into account heterogeneous profiles of individual. Furthermore, we model the social transfer that takes place during the interaction of individuals in order to understand how cultural ideas are transmitted. This paper also provides a non-exhaustive but detailed survey of the state of the art on the agent-based terrorist networks modelling.

Mots clés: Cultural transfer; Network formation; Social simulation; Agents; Terrorism; Radicalization

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Carlos Sureda Gutierrez, Frédéric Amblard, Benoit Gaudou. An agent-based simulation of extremist network formation through radical behavior diffusion. 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2017), Feb 2017, Porto, Portugal. pp. 236-243. ⟨hal-01740006⟩