Swarm Shopping - The Simulation of Herd Behavior

This paper asks a new question: how people can intervene in the collective shopping behavior of self-organized group of customers in the supermarket. And then how they can measure it's influence on overall shopping pattern. The authors try to answer the question by proposing a simulation model with the help of animats (artificial customers), whereby animats become aware of other animats' real-time shopping inventory and may hence be influenced by their purchases and the levels of purchases. This simulation sets to provide the answers of questions like the percentage of increase in sales given real-time purchase information to other customers, and a platform to generate herd behavior.