Contagion Propagation with Rule-Based Reasoning and Decentralized Control in an Agent-Based Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Susceptible Infodemic Model

In recent years, and especially during the on-going pandemic, the interest in investigating the dynamics of infodemics has increased to unprecedented levels. In this study we propose an agent-based model for the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and other similar information. The model is based on the susceptible-infected-recovered-susceptible epidemic interpretation. We introduce a rule-based reasoning module to model individual bias in the perception of information based on the psychology concept of illusion of knowledge. We integrate this module into a deliberative-reactive agent controller structure and a decentralized control scheme for the multi-agent system. Results show significant differences between the outputs of the proposed model and the classical version, impressing on the effects of considering local agent individuality when modeling human psycho-social interactions.