# ABS-SOCI: An Agent-Based Simulator of Student Sociograms
## 1 Introduction  
Instructors should take several aspects into account in order to obtain a high quality level of education customized for a particular group of students. One of the most relevant ones is the proper adaption of the lectures to the academic level of students. Another factor is to consider the social relations among the students, as these can condition their academic performance. For instance, isolated students may have a lower academic performance. Instructors can mitigate the isolation of certain students by making teamwork activities assuring that the potential isolated students are well integrated in their teams [1]. For achieving this purpose, it is essential that teachers have the appropriate tools for estimating the relations among students. This is the reason why a simulator of student sociograms can be helpful for teachers in order to personalize the education regarding the social statuses of students.  
The current work presents an agent-based simulator (ABS) called ABS-SOCI for predicting sociograms of students classified by their activity roles.  
ABS-SOCI assists teachers in ameliorating the isolation of students. It can also allow teachers to anticipate potential cases of bullied students. Notice that bullying has been considered as one of the most worrying problems in education [2], which, in the worst cases, can imply dramatic outcomes such as suicides.  
ABS-SOCI has some advantages over the application of general-purpose ABS tools such as NetLogo [3] and Repast [4]. For instance, ABS-SOCI can directly use a customized representation of sociograms, so that ABS researchers do not need to deal with the implementation of their graphical representations. The graphical sociogram representation of ABS-SOCI includes different kinds of arrows (representing respectively selection and rejection relations) with different intensities (represented with different widths), and the individuals are represented in a circled layout as commonly done in sociograms [5]. In addition, ABS-SOCI simulates the evolution of social relations from a matrix of affinities between student activity roles, considering aspects such as the duration of the relations, their trends, and the common reciprocity. The implementation of these aspects are not straightforward in general-purpose ABS tools, to the best of the authors' knowledge.  
The current research focuses on validating that the simulator forecasts sociograms are similar to the real ones. For this purpose, we have assessed the current approach by comparisons in (1) three different real scenarios taken from the literature and (2) another scenario from the experience of one of the current authors. ABS-SOCI has provided the base for the simulation of teaching strategies [6] and the clustering of students from their features for later simulating their social relations [7].  
The next section introduces the related work. Section 3 introduces ABS-SOCI describing its theoretical bases and its underlying behavior. Section 4 describes the experiments conducted with ABS-SOCI, and Section 5 mentions the conclusions and future lines of research.