IoT Article An Agent-Based Model of Task-Allocation and Resource-Sharing for Social Internet of Things Kashif Zia 1, * , Umar Farooq 2 , Muhammad Shafi 1 and Muhammad Arshad 3   Citation: Zia, K.; Farooq, U.; Shafi, M.; Arshad, M. An Agent-Based Model of Task-Allocation and Resource-Sharing for Social Internet of Things. IoT 2021, 2, 187–204. https://doi.org/10.3390/iot2010010 Academic Editors: Jinan Fiaidhi, Sabah Mohammed, Simon Fong, Naseer Al-Jawad and Dalin Zhang Received: 20 February 2021 Accepted: 22 March 2021 Published: 23 March 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Faculty of Computingand Information Technology, Sohar University, Sohar 311, Oman 2 Department of CS, University of Science and Technology Bannu, Bannu 28100, Pakistan; umar@ustb.edu.pk 3 Computer Science Department, City University of Science and Information Technology Peshawar, Peshawar 25000, Pakistan; MShafi@su.edu.om * Correspondence: kzia@su.edu.om Abstract: The things in the Internet of Things are becoming more and more socially aware. What social means for these things (more often termed as “social objects”) is predominately determined by how and when objects interact with each other. In this paper, an agent-based model for Social Internet of Things is proposed, which features the realization of various interaction modalities, along with possible network structures and mobility modes, thus providing a novel model to ask interesting “what-if” questions. The scenario used, which is the acquisition of shared resources in a common spatial and temporal world, demands agents to have ad-hoc communication and a willingness to cooperate with others. The model was simulated for all possible combinations of input parameters to study the implications of competitive vs. cooperative social behavior while agents try to acquire shared resources/services in a peer-to-peer fashion. However, the main focus of the paper was to analyze the impact of profile-based mobility, which has an underpinning on parameters of extent and scale of a mobility profile. The simulation results, in addition to others, reveal that there are substantial and systematic differences among different combinations of values for extent and scale. Keywords: agent-based model; social objects; social Internet of Things; competitive and cooperative behaviors; Task-Allocation; resource-sharing 1. Introduction Internet of Things (IoT)[1] is claimed to be the most advanced and sophisticated futuristic technology by many people [2] and is more ubiquitous and social compared to more recent technologies. Social Internet of Things (SIoT)[3] is an emerging area in research, in which IoT is augmented with social capabilities. The characteristics of the social aspects of objects of SIoT has been evolving with time [4]. The discussion on things of SIoT, which started in terms of smart objects, is now shifted towards acting objects. The smart objects have the capability to communicate with social networks of humans while the acting objects are the virtual objects representing humans on their behalf. Researchers have developed many applications for these domains, however, the actual challenge is about modeling the social objects, which are capable of creating and managing their own social networks [5,6]. Seemingly, SIoT (comprising social objects) is the next big thing. However, there is a potential danger of enthusiastically adopting a technology without considering its disad- vantages. Looking at the recent past, it cannot be denied that our society has experienced adverse consequences of having a careless attitude towards adopting Internet-based tech- nologies for social networking and mobile computing [7]. Since there are no limits on the scale and inclusion of objects in the IoT domain, it is very important to foresee the outfalls of it. In summary, the social objects must be carefully modeled, otherwise, the interactions, actions, and influence of social objects due to their self-maintained social networks may turn them to be biased, disadvantageous, or sometimes even destructive for society [4,5]. IoT 2021, 2, 187–204. https://doi.org/10.3390/iot2010010 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/iot