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 "Conflict modeling"
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Item An Agent-Based Model of Conflict in East Africa and the Effect of Watering Holes(Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, 2010-03) Kennedy, W.G.; Hailegiorgis, A.B.; Rouleau, M.; Bassett, J.K.; Coletti, M.; Balan, G.C.; Gulden, T.An agent-based model conflict between herdsmen in east Africa using the MASON agent-based simulation environment is presented. Herders struggle to keep their herds fed and watered in a GIS-based, spatially diverse environment with data-driven seasonal cycles. The model produces realistic carrying capacity dynamics and basically plausible conflict dynamics. With the rather basic set of behaviors, herders come into conflict over limited resources and one clan is eventually eliminated. We find that greater environmental scarcity leads to faster domination by a single group. At the same time, we note that there is tremendous variability from run to run in the rate and timing of the transition from a conflict-prone, multi-clan environment to hegemony of a single group.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.