Research Article Towards Exploration of Social in Social Internet of Vehicles Using an Agent-Based Simulation Kashif Zia , 1,2 Arshad Muhammad , 1 Abbas Khalid, 3 Ahmad Din, 4,5 and Alois Ferscha 2 1 Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Sohar University, Sohar, Oman 2 Institute of Pervasive Computing, University of Linz, Austria 3 Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Te University of Lahore, Pakistan 4 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Abbottabad Campus, Pakistan 5 School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Georgia (UGA), Athens, GA, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Kashif Zia; kzia@soharuni.edu.om Received 16 December 2018; Revised 27 February 2019; Accepted 18 March 2019; Published 15 April 2019 Academic Editor: Roberto Natella Copyright © 2019 Kashif Zia et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is turning out to be one of the frst impressive examples of Internet of Tings (IoT). In IoV, the factors of connectivity and interaction/information dispersion are equally important as sensing/actuating, context-awareness, services provisioning, etc. However, most of the researches related to connectivity and interaction are constrained to physics of signaling and data science (semantics/contents), respectively. Very rapidly, the meanings of these factors are changing due to evolution of technologies from physical to social domain. For example, Social IoV (SIoV) is a term used to represent when vehicles build and manage their own social network. Hence, in addition to physical aspects, the social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion towards these systems of future should also be researched, a domain so far ignored in this particular context. In this paper, an agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) of a hypothetical population of smart vehicles is presented. Some important hypotheses are tested under reasonable connectivity and data constraints. Te simulation results reveal that closure of social ties and its timing impacts the dispersion of novel information (necessary for a recommender system) substantially. It is also observed that as the network evolves due to incremental interactions, the recommendations guaranteeing a fair distribution of vehicles across equally good competitors is not possible. 1. Introduction Te latest manifestation of “all connected world” is IoT [1]. Following “Internet of-” idiom, Internet of Vehicles (more popularly known as Vehicular Internet of Tings (VIoT)) is ready to be visible soon, which in addition to having strong connection with IoT builds on already deployed technologies, such as Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) [2] and Vehicular Social Networks (VSN) [3]. However, the conception of VIoT is well beyond the state-of-the-art and ready to leap into a chasm of possibilities, recently termed as Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) [4], whereby vehicles build and manage their own social network. Just like social networking opening up a plethora of new recommendation applications, SIoV has an unlimited potential of changing what we do and how we live. It can be used to recommend location- and profle-based services, including fnding trustworthy services [5, 6], vehicles nav- igation and monitoring [7–9], managing network access [10], targeted advertising [11, 12], drivers behavior modeling [13], and more. Although, these examples are mostly related to the vehicular networking, but we can easily imagine a broader perspective wherever recommendation services in a dynamic and evolving network of objects is involved, such as social networking, IoT, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), microrobotics, etc. Hence, the fndings of this paper can be applied to any other related domain equally well. All technologies (at least for now) designed to be sub- servient to humanity always have an intrinsic attachment with its users, drivers and passengers in case of SIoV. Tere- fore, when a vehicle is part of SIoV, it must build and deploy its network (of vehicles) in order to accomplish users’ goals. But Hindawi Complexity Volume 2019, Article ID 8201396, 13 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/8201396