The Cultural Geography Model: Evaluating the Impact of Tactical Operational Outcomes on a Civilian Population in an Irregular Warfare Environment
Jonathan K. Alt, Leroy Jackson, David E. Hudak, Stephen Lieberman · The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation Applications Methodology Technology · 2009
The civilian population has been described as ‘the center of gravity in irregular warfare’. Understanding the behavioral response of the civilian population in irregular warfare operations presents a major challenge area to the joint modeling and simulation community where there is a clear need for the development of models, methods, and tools to address civilian behavior response. This paper provides a conceptual and theoretical overview of the Cultural Geography (CG) model, a government-owned, open-source agent-based model designed to address the behavioral response of civilian populations in conflict environments. With an embedded case study, we describe the development of cognitive modules to represent the civilian population and their implementation as Bayesian belief networks (BBNs), the social structure module implemented using homophily, the process of adjudicating the effects of tactical level outcomes on a population segment within the model, and a sample case study analysis using a designed experiment.