Mason-Yale Joint Project on Computational Modeling of Complex Crises in East Africa
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Mission: To develop new agent-based spatial simulation models for analyzing scenarios of societal consequences of disasters in the East Africa region.
Principal Investigator: Dr Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, George Mason University
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Browsing Mason-Yale Joint Project on Computational Modeling of Complex Crises in East Africa by Subject "Agent-based models"
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Item Complex Polities in the Age of Modern States(International Studies Association, 2011-03-16) Cioffi-Revilla, ClaudioComplex polities are political systems composed of both official "vertical" state institutions as well as one or more alternative set of "horizontal" institutions, such as religious, economic, paramilitary, or even criminal organizations. Both vertical and horizontal polities that compose complex polities have policy-making capacity engaged in the provision of public (and in some cases private) goods aimed at addressing various societal needs. While complex polities have existed since early antiquity, from a world historical perspective it is only since ca. 1500 CE and the formation of modern European states that contending vertical and horizontal polities have produced specialized institutions in competition and collaboration with the state. Moreover, complex polities for global governance also appear in the world system since ca. 1500 CE. This paper will present a theory of complex polities based on a computational perspective that is implemented in agent-based models of coupled socio-techno-natural systems - i.e., systems of governance that integrate societies and natural environments through artificial systems that mediate between the two at many scales, from local to global.Item MASON AfriLand: A Regional Multi-Country Agent-Based Model with Cultural and Environmental Dynamics(2009-06) Cioffi-Revilla, C.; Rouleau, M.Agent-based models of regions of the international system composed of several countries are few and not as advanced as other classes of spatial computational models on a comparable scale. Most relevant extant models are of a single country or polity, or they model an entire international system putatively comprising all countries as in a world system. Here we present AfriLand, a new agentbased model for developing a large-scale and more detailed model of the geographic region of contemporary Eastern Africa. AfriLand is part of the Mason-HRAF Joint Project on Eastern Africa funded by a multi-year ONR-MURI grant. We present the motivation and challenges behind the AfriLand agent-based model design and a description of the model architecture and dynamics. AfriLand offers a useful scale for analyzing socio-cultural and environmental dynamics that transcend national boundaries, such as refugee flows, transnational conflict and crime (narcotics, trafficking in persons, smuggling) and natural hazards across national frontiers. AfriLand also presents visualization challenges that call for a range of solutions from software to hardware.Item MASON RebeLand: An Agent-Based Model of Politics, Environment, and Insurgency(2010-02) Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio; Rouleau, MarkProblem overview: explore the complex relationship between Society, Government, and Issues, using an explicit polity (political system) model; understand the feedback amongst Citizen Satisfaction, Issue Management, and Government Legitimacy; and generate emergence of civil unrest and polity instability from the “Bottom Up” within an Agent-Based Model.Item MASON RebeLand: An Agent-Based Model of Politics, Environment, and Insurgency(Wiley-Blackwell, 2010-03) Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio; Rouleau, MarkSocial simulation models from computational social science are beginning to provide significant advances in terms of implementing more complex social, human, and natural dynamics that are characteristic of how countries operate in the real world. In particular, increasingly realistic agent-based models can improve capacity for early warning, understanding, and prediction. The MASON RebeLand model presents three innovations over earlier models: (i) an explicit polity model with politically complete structure and processes; (ii) social and natural model components within an integrated socio-natural system; and (iii) generative dynamics where insurgency and the state of the polity (stable, unstable, failing, failed, and recovering) occur as emergent phenomena under a range of social and environmental conditions. Three scenarios are demonstrated, showing stable, unstable, and failing polity conditions. The MASON computational system for agent-based and network modeling also permits additional experiments and extensions.