Abstract
We present an Agent-Based model called ProtestLab for the simulation of street protests, with multiple types of agents (protesters, police and ‘media’) and scenario features (attraction points, obstacles and entrances/exits). In ProtestLab agents can have multiple “personalities” (implemented via agent subtypes), goals and possible states, including violent confrontation. The model includes quantitative measures of emergent crowd patterns, protest intensity, police effectiveness and potential ‘news impact’, which can be used to compare simulation outputs with estimates from videos of real protests for parametrization and validation. ProtestLab was applied to a scenario of policemen defending a government building from protesters (typical of anti-austerity protests in front of the Parliament in Lisbon, Portugal) and reproduced many features observed in real events, such as clustering of ‘active’ and ‘violent’ protesters, formation of moving confrontation lines, occasional fights and arrests, ‘media’ agents wiggling around ‘hot spots’ and policemen with defensive or offensive behaviour.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
However, if the global variable move-radius is increased from its default value of 1 a velocity varying in steps of 1/move-radius can be introduced.
- 3.
The L 1 norm \(\|\boldsymbol{x}\|_{1} =\sum \limits _{ i=1}^{N}\vert x_{i}\vert \) in Eq. (3) was introduced as a normalization factor, so that personality vectors of different agents can be inspected and compared if required.
- 4.
Quantitative analyses of videos accessible from YouTube are limited due short duration, unsteady camera handling and poor still-image quality. Videos that show localized fights usually do not show global views of the crowd and vice-versa. Also, it is difficult to identify protesters that are active or passive to estimate their proportions. In our analyses of videos we expect errors of 1–2 m on distances and 20 % on proportions, which we consider acceptable for purposes of the present work.
- 5.
We only represented the 10 m strip of the staircase adjacent to the street to reduce the number of cells and make the figures more legible. This is not a strong limitation since the important dynamics usually unfolds on the part of the staircase included in the model.
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Acknowledgements
Support by the CISDI - Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares - Lisbon, Portugal to one of the authors (Carlos Lemos) is gratefully acknowledged. Support by centre grant (to BioISI, Centre Reference: UID/MULTI/04046/2013), from FCT/MCTES/PIDDAC, Portugal, to Carlos Lemos and Helder Coelho is also acknowledged.
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Lemos, C.M., Coelho, H., Lopes, R.J. (2017). ProtestLab: A Computational Laboratory for Studying Street Protests. In: Nemiche, M., Essaaidi, M. (eds) Advances in Complex Societal, Environmental and Engineered Systems. Nonlinear Systems and Complexity, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46164-9_1
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