Abstract
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Abstract—Alcohol-related problems (assaults, accidents and/or
crimes) and alcohol abuse are recurrent societal problems
leading to high social costs. Finding adapted policies to tackle
this issue isn’t a trivial task due to the highly complex nature of
alcohol consumption as many interrelated risk factors interact
in a hardly predictable way. This paper describes an agentbased
simulation model, called SimARC (Simulation of
Alcohol-Related Consequences), aiming at exploring the
complex interplay of these factors following a generative
process whereby theory and model co-evolve within iterative
loops. To explore the complexity of alcohol use and abuse, we
need not only to include the aforementioned risk factors but
also their evolution and highly dynamical interactions across
scales. Therefore, our agent-based model aims to encapsulate
several levels of reality. Considering an ontology as catalog of
elements and relation amongst those elements, our ontologydriven
behavioral model includes: neuro-biological responses
to alcohol use (individual level), peer influence channeled
through various social networks (meso-level) and societal
responses to alcohol-related problems (meta-level). This
ontological framework aims to establish a robust test-bed to
analyze – in silico – the plausible consequences of various
public policies related to alcohol abuse in public venues. After
a brief review of the literature, we present SimARC’s core
structure and preliminary results.
Keywords-component; agent-based model, ontology, alcohol,
social simulation, public health