An opinion control rule with minimum adjustments to support the consensus reaching in bounded confidence model

Abstract

Opinion dynamics provides a modeling tool for the public opinion management. The existing studies mainly focused on building the evolution model of opinions. However, the control of public opinions has been a key problem in practical opinion dynamics. The objective of this paper is to propose an opinion control rule to support the consensus reaching. Based on the bounded confidence model, the consensus model with the minimum adjustment is proposed. Next, based on the proposed consensus model, we propose the opinion control rule to support the consensus reaching. Furthermore, a numerical example is given to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed opinion control rule. Through simulation experiments, we investigate the effects of adjustment thresholds and bounded confidences on the opinion control rule.