Social Simulations for Crises: From Models to Usable Implementations

Simulations created for crises naturally have two important goals: the simulation must both be sound and solid from a scientific standpoint, but also should be exploitable at very short notice by stakeholders in the decision-support of the crisis. A central activity of building simulations during crises is conducting an advanced software project, for which implementing the central simulation model is only one of the many tasks. Taking a systems-design perspective, this chapter describes the needs, concerns, and solutions for achieving the goals raised by simulations during crises by illustrating how they were addressed by the ASSOCC software platform within the project. In particular, ASSOCC goes beyond classic social simulation standards by incorporating dedicated visualisation aspects, leading to an architecture that combines a simulation module (in NetLogo), a visualisation module (in Unity) and an analysis module (in R). This chapter explains what modules were required and for which purpose, what outcome to expect from developing such modules, and how to design and implement such a module and overarching architecture to interact with one another.