Towards an ABM-Based Framework for Investigating Consumer Behaviour in the Insurance Industry

This paper presents a framework that builds upon agent-based modelling for investigating the behaviour of consumers in the insurance industry. Consumers are modelled as agents and clustered in groups reflecting their income levels. Agents that model consumers are characterised by their socio-demographic features and interact with other insurance consumer-agents by means of local and global social networks. Furthermore, the environment in which they evolve models the impact of external factors such as mortality, disease and other accident rates as well as insurance culture. This makes that consumer-agents accumulate experience, improve their understanding and knowledge of financial products, and thus develop their perception of need for security and consider the usefulness of insurance services. In turn, the framework enables to model the construction of the customers’ insurance product purchase decision.p

Design of multimedia processor based on metric computation

Media-processing applications, such as signal processing, 2D and 3D graphics rendering, and image compression, are the dominant workloads in many embedded systems today. The real-time constraints of those media applications have taxing demands on today's processor performances with low cost, low power and reduced design delay. To satisfy those challenges, a fast and efficient strategy consists in upgrading a low cost general purpose processor core. This approach is based on the personalization of a general RISC processor core according the target multimedia application requirements. Thus, if the extra cost is justified, the general purpose processor GPP core can be enforced with instruction level coprocessors, coarse grain dedicated hardware, ad hoc memories or new GPP cores. In this way the final design solution is tailored to the application requirements. The proposed approach is based on three main steps: the first one is the analysis of the targeted application using efficient metrics. The second step is the selection of the appropriate architecture template according to the first step results and recommendations. The third step is the architecture generation. This approach is experimented using various image and video algorithms showing its feasibility