Abstract: The study of the generation and evolution of emergent collective event has become an important topic of social management. The computational social science approach provides a new method to analyze this issue deeply. By reviewing the previous research and empirical analysis of several cases, the global factors of emergent collective events are suggested. They are the level of public trust in the government, interest demand or social problem solving mechanism and the social common brief. When these global factors reached a certain level, they form the important conditions for emergent collective event. Under certain global conditions, the formation of emergent collective event depends deeply on the individual interactions through the social network. Based on the model of computational sociology, the generation and evolution of emergent collective event on the artificial social network is simulated and the effects of global factors and individual interactions are analyzed. The result of the simulation demonstrated the critical value of some endogenous factors when other factors are constant. A necessary fundamental model is provided for the further study on the generation and evolution of emergent collective event.

Key words: emergent collective events, computational sociology, endogenous factors, global factors, social network