Social simulation could help answer the difficult questions

By June Finch, NeISS.

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Social simulation is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field of research, with applications across the research community. Models are used to represent social processes and enable them to be investigated in silico. There are models for everything from political negotiations to the transmission of diseases across social and spatial networks, from the study of kinship relationships in mediaeval societies to the formation of prices within economic markets.

A researcher could use a social-simulation model to represent the population of a city as a synthetic database of individuals and households. This population can be projected forwards in time to evaluate the population’s future behaviour. For example, the model could provide predictions of the future demand for health care, transport or housing. This is of interest to social scientists in the study of social processes and behaviour, and of great practical interest to organisations that have a responsibility for service provision and resource allocation.

NeISS is working towards an e-Infrastructure to open up the field of social simulation to a wider range of social scientists and policymakers. The project is in the process of developing tools which will enable researchers to create workflows to run their own simulations, visualise and analyse results, and publish them for future discovery, sharing and re-use.

http://www.neiss.org.uk