Potential of Social Modelling in Socio-Technical Systems

While modelling (and simulating) a socio-technical system, the primary focus has been on the technological side almost ignoring the social dimension of it. However, with recent advancements in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and emotions sensing technologies, it is now possible to fill this gap. To this end, we have integrated cognitive decision making model abstracted from psychological, neurological and social theories of human behaviour in evacuation situations into a simulated environment, assisted by AmI technology. Initial simulation findings are reported in this paper, keeping focus on a scenario in which a small population of agents is technologically assisted. The results are: (i) the technologically assisted agents emerge as leaders during evacuation changing the intentions of most of the agents, and (ii) even a small population of such leaders is sufficient to guarantee an efficient evacuation due to leader following behaviour emerging as a social phenomenon.