Modeling & Simulation
EBR provides Modeling and Simulation (M&S) expertise to the DoD community to help understand the social systems and components supporting irregular warfare. This is a critical area of analysis given the changes in threats to national security as we evolve from a nation with a fixed known adversary to a nation with variable unknown adversaries. Agility is needed to address the emerging and rapidly adapting Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information attributes. Understanding the underlying issues via modeling and simulation will improve our ability to respond to unanticipated events in an agile manner and address such emerging issues as political instability and stability operations, international insurgencies, media influence, and corruption. Our senior researchers have expertise in numerous social science domains, complex systems, probability and statistics, and operations research; all of which contribute to our ability to model and understand human behavior, be it at the individual level or an entire society.
M&S is a discipline that leverages two concepts to help understand the parts of a system, their interactions among those parts, and the system as a whole.
- A model is a simplified representation of a system at a point in time or space and the output presents one possible snapshot of the behavior of the system.
- A simulation is a manipulation of the model in both space and time to aid in understanding the dynamics of the system.
EBR has experience with both models and simulations to include: Human, Social, Cultural, and Behavioral (HSCB) simulations, verification and validation of complex social-political phenomena, the theory of complex adaptive systems, system dynamics models, agent based models, Bayesian models, regression models, and network models. EBR has additional expertise in information assurance and network centric operations that help us craft M&S solutions for cyberspace as well as human behavior.
EBR is doing research on one of the key issues surrounding very large complex models of human behavior: scalability and computability.