A simple Ising spin model which can describe a mechanism of making a decision in a closed community is proposed. It is shown via standard Monte Carlo simulations that very simple rules lead to rather complicated dynamics and to a power law in the decision time distribution. It is found that a closed community has to evolve either to a dictatorship or a stalemate state (inability to take any common decision). A common decision can be taken in a "democratic way" only by an open community.

Opinion evolution in closed community

The use of apron buses for transporting passengers from the airport terminal to the airplane has become common practice for a series of airports worldwide. Airline companies have become increasingly aware of this practice and have added information to their boarding passes to suggest the airplane door passengers should use while boarding the airplane. In contrast, many of the literature's methods to reduce boarding time assume the presence of a jet-bridge connecting the airplane to the terminal. These boarding methods are “by seat” and “by group” methods. The use of the apron buses for passengers' transport limits the usage of these methods because, in most cases now, only two apron buses are needed for transporting the passengers. With two apron buses, boarding control is limited to deciding on which passengers to assign to each of the two buses. We propose 15 new methods that we tested against the previously published Back-to-front method adapted for the apron buses case, by considering 7 luggage situations. An agent-based model in NetLogo is created based on field trials and considerations made in the literature, and we used this model for simulations. Experimental results show that the best performing proposed methods combine aspects of the WilMA and Reverse Pyramid boarding methods adapted for apron buses. The best proposed method can reduce boarding time by up to 39.2% when compared to the benchmark Back-to-front method.

/pdf/methods-for-accelerating-the-airplane-boarding-process-in-3c15u1652y.pdf

Methods for Accelerating the Airplane Boarding Process in the Presence of Apron Buses

As the evacuation problem has attracted and continues to attract a series of researchers due to its high importance both for saving human lives and for reducing the material losses in such situations, the present paper analyses whether the evacuation doors configuration in the case of classrooms and lecture halls matters in reducing the evacuation time. For this aim, eighteen possible doors configurations have been considered along with five possible placements of desks and chairs. The doors configurations have been divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical clusters based on the two doors positions within the room. An agent-based model has been created in NetLogo which allows a fast configuration of the classrooms and lecture halls in terms of size, number of desks and chairs, desks and chair configuration, exits’ size, the presence of fallen objects, type of evacuees and their speed. The model has been used for performing and analyzing various scenarios. Based on these results, it has been observed that, in most cases, the symmetrical doors configurations provide good/optimal results, while only some of the asymmetrical doors configurations provide comparable/better results. The model is configurable and can be used in various scenarios.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/12/4/627/pdf

Investigating the Exits’ Symmetry Impact on the Evacuation Process of Classrooms and Lecture Halls: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

This paper proposes a method for reducing the time to complete the boarding of a two-door airplane when its passengers are transported from the airport terminal to the airplane using two apron buses. In contrast to other methods that assign passengers to apron buses, our method considers groups of passengers traveling together (e.g. families). In particular, we propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model that assigns each group of passengers (including each single-passenger group) to one of the two apron buses based on their seating assignments. We assume that all seats on the apron buses and the two-door airplane are occupied. We conduct stochastic simulation experiments with the proposed MIP-based method and with a baseline method that assigns groups of passengers with seats furthest from one of the airplane doors to the first apron bus and assigns remaining groups to the second apron bus. Numerical results indicate that the proposed MIP-based method reduces the boarding time by up to 27.31% when compared with the baseline approach.

/pdf/airplane-boarding-method-for-passenger-groups-when-using-ydraav9mop.pdf

Airplane Boarding Method for Passenger Groups When Using Apron Buses

Ideas that challenge the status quo either evaporate or dominate. The study of opinion dynamics in the socio-physics literature treats space as uniform and considers individuals in an isolated community, using ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. We extend these ODE models to include multiple communities and their interactions. These extended ODE models can be thought of as being ODEs on directed graphs. We study in detail these models to determine conditions under which there will be consensus and pluralism within the system. Most of the consensus/pluralism analysis is done for the case of one and two cities. However, we numerically show for the case of a symmetric cycle graph that an elementary bifurcation analysis provides insight into the phenomena of clustering. Moreover, for the case of a cycle graph with a hub, we discuss how having a sufficient proportion of zealots in the hub leads to the entire network sharing the opinion of the zealots.This article is part of the theme issue 'Stability of nonlinear waves and patterns and related topics'.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsta.2017.0186

Consensus and clustering in opinion formation on networks.

Opinions continuously evolve in society. While conservative ideas may get replaced by a new one, some views remain immutable. Opinion formation and innovation diffusion have witnessed lots of attention in the last decade due to its widespread applicability in the diverse domain of science and technology. We analyse these scenarios in which interactions at the micro level results in the changes in opinions at the macro level in a population of predefined ideological groups. We use the Bass model, otherwise well known for understanding innovation diffusion phenomena, to compute adoption probabilities of three opinion states-zealot, extremists and moderates. Thereafter, we employ cellular automata to explore the emergence of opinions through local and overlapped interactions between agents (people). NetLogo environment has been used to develop an agent-based model, simulating different ideological scenarios. Simulation results validate a critical proportion of committed individuals as a plausible basis for ideological shifts in societies. The analysis elucidates upon the role of moderates in the population and emergence of varying opinions. The results further delineate the role of evangelism through social and non-social methods in propagating views. The results obtained from these simulations endorse the conclusions reported in previous studies regarding the role of a critical zealot population, and the preponderance of non-social influence. We, however, use two-phase opinion model with different experimental settings. Additionally, we examine global observable, such as entropy of the system to reveal common patterns of adoption in the views and evenness of population after reaching a consensus.

/pdf/on-the-role-of-evangelism-in-consensus-formation-a-42wvqxcmx4.pdf

Bishwaraj Chourasia

Papers

On the role of evangelism in consensus formation: a simulation approach