The Schelling's model of segregation analyzes the dynamics occuring inside neighborhoods, where its inhabitants show remarkable differences in gender, age, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and religion. From now on I will call this remarkable differences features. In this model we have a grid where each agent is placed. Each agent has its own feature and a threshold. The threshold is the tollerance an agent has. The threshold defines how many agent with different feature can live nearby.
For example let's assume a model with two possible genders that we represent with 1 and 0
| \ | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | # | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | # | 0 |
| 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
We consider a neighbourhood as a 5x5 grid. We assume that every agent has a threshold of 30%. Every agent checks for his neighbours, if more than 30% of them are different than him, than he will move to one of the free spots marked with a #.
Below there is the same with the agents that will move marked like this
| \ | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | # | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 4 | 0 | 1 | 1 | # | 0 |
| 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
All the agents marked in blue will ove to one of the empty spots. This process goes on and on until an equilibrium is reached. In this case if you reproduce the same setting on the WEB APP it will end up with one agent costantly moving without finding the right spot where he can settle.
In the WEB APP it is possible to change various factor that influence how the agents interact with each other:
- Threshold
- Size of the grid
- Number of different features
- The amount of empty spots
By changing the values of those three factors it is possible to visualize how the agents segragate.
