CELL-DEVS Modelling of Individual Behaviour Towards Influencers in Social Media

With the exponentially rising popularity of social mediaSocial media, and the provided convenience of digital advertising across various platforms, individuals have found ways to sustain a lifestyle by providing companies with a personalised platform for advertising their products. These individuals are popularly labelled as ‘influencers’. Determining the impact an influencer has on a product market is an important aspect in determining whether a company should invest in the influencer’s platform. The model presented in this paper, namely, the influencer model employs the Cell-DEVSCELL-DEVS modelling formalism, an extension of cellular automataCellular automata that can be used to build discrete-event spaces, implemented through the Cadmium tool to simulate the reaction of individuals towards an influencer. The model simulates the rate of increase of follower count under various scenarios that exercise various reactions and employs an opinion-based approach that simulates an individual’s evolving opinion state towards a subject.