Simulación computacional de grupos de investigación en la Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica

Abstract

Computational simulation of research groups at Costa Rican Distance Education University. Social network analysis deals with quantitative studies of human groups and has established a set of measurements to understand their structure and behaviour. Nevertheless, their dynamism is only expressed to a limited extend and multiagent modeling and simulation has become a complementary analytical method. It enables researchers to simulate human interactions on virtual environments and to discover emergent patterns of behavior. This article presents a multiagent system that models and simulates the dynamics of research groups at the Costa Rican Distance Education University. The results of a first scenario point out that the initial amount of available resources in the system does not have a causal relationship with the clustering coefficient, i.e the metric used to measure the reseachers’ tendency to form groups. The concept of resource must be reconsidered to include infrastructure and equipment availability. A second scenario shows that as the number of researchers increases, the clustering coefficient decreases. This effect is atributed to a tendency to equilibrium in the relative costs and benefits of maintaining a given number of researchers. More variables are needed for a reliable simulation.