A System Dynamics and Agent-Based Approach to Model Emotions in Collaborative Networks

A good amount of research within the last few decades has been focusing on computational models of emotion and the relationships they have with human emotional processes and how they affect the surrounding environments. The study of emotions is interdisciplinary and ranges from basic human emotion research, like in psychology, to the social sciences studies present in sociology. The interactions between those and the computational sciences are becoming a challenge. One particular challenge that is presented in this paper is the study of collaborative emotions within a Collaborative Network (CN) environment. A CN is composed of different participants with different interaction characteristics such as, expectations, will to cooperate and share, leadership, communication, and organizational abilities, among others. This paper presents an approach, based on system dynamics and agent-based modeling, to model the emotional state of an individual member of the network (via a non-intrusive way). Some simulation results illustrate the approach.