Agent Based Simulations for Societal Resilience in Crisis Situations

It is challenging to ensure societal resilience, i.e., a society's ability to prevent, to anticipate, to adapt to, to recover from, and to minimise the impact of crises. This was very clear during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trying to respond to a crisis at the moment that it occurs leaves no time to carefully balance different aspects of society. During the Covid-19 pandemic governments have tried to put in place restrictions that would curb the spread of Covid-19 while in the meantime trying to preserve economic activities. But what seemed to work well in one country did not work in another country (due to different societal infrastructure, history, culture, etc.)

While crises can occur suddenly and hit the society unprepared, actions for improving societal resilience tend to require profound changes and need to be taken well in advance before the beginning of the actual crisis. Hence, to facilitate societal resilience, we need tools that enable us to investigate how our society might be affected by different disaster scenarios as well as how the introduction of policies affects societal resilience in these different scenarios. Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS) are particularly well-suited for investigating the effects of policies and, thus, have a great potential to become a valuable and established tool for decision-makers in crisis situations.

The aim of this workshop is to  learn from models built for crises, e.g., during the Covid-19 pandemic and other crises that any of the participants have practical model experience with: What worked well? What is missing? Where do we need improvements? What are the requirements for the tools that are necessary? We want to create a roadmap of research and development in agent-based social simulation for this kinds of crises in order to be better prepared to support governments and health care authorities.

At the workshop we want to discuss the following topics:

• What were the successes/failures of agent based social simulations for crises?
• How can we develop agent-based models and catalogues of theories that allow for a quick adaptation?
• What platforms or suite of tools do we need to support the development of social simulations for resilience?
• How can we institutionalise the efforts of creating these social simulations?

The result of the workshop should lead to a white paper that can be the basis of an article in, for instance, the International Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation. Additionally, we hope to create a community of researchers that will keep collaborating and ensure funding for social simulations for a resilient society in crisis situations.