I am a week late on this, however, I want to point out that The Economist featured an article on agent-based modeling in their quarterly technology review. The article is not specifically concerned with the use of ABM in investigating political science questions, or issues of national security (in fact, the first section discussion the Ork agents in Lord of the Rings); but, the review does highlight interesting research on human behavior during a catastrophe.
Nate Wittasek is interested in understanding how people behave during a building fire:
…on hearing a fire alarm many people do absolutely nothing. It is only when they see direct evidence of a fire, such as smoke or flames, that they act, says Mr Wittasek. How people respond to a fire also depends on their age, size and physical condition. Modelling people as a smooth-flowing fluid fails to capture such basic features, says Mr Wittasek. “We have all this great physics for figuring out how heat moves in a building, but what we lack is how people behave,” he says. “If we understand that better, then we can inform our designs better.”
This research has clear application to national security, particularly for first responders and emergency management. There has been some interesting application of ABM to terrorist attack and disaster response modeling, but the work of Mr. Wittasek appears to be much more advanced. An interesting addition to these models would be the science of contagion, especially in the case of modeling a biological or chemical attack, where the severity of a situation rises with how humans react and interact at ground zero. Maybe this will be a question IARPA decides to address in Reynard?
Photo: The Economist
Automatically Generated Related posts:
Popular Posts