The Cultural Geography Model: An Agent Based Modeling Framework for Analysis of the Impact of Culture in Irregular Warfare

The development of tools to provide insight into the behavioral response of a civilian population will greatly benefit the modeling and simulation community and have potential applications across multiple user communities in the U.S. Department of Defense. We present an overview of a modular agent-based modeling framework, grounded in the human behavioral and social theory, which is intended to represent a populations’ stance on issues as a function of their changing beliefs, values and interests. We utilize and integrate theories of narrative identity [1] and planned behavior [2] with macrosociological theories of heterogeneity and influence [3][4] to model civilian behavior in a conflict ecosystem. Communication between agents takes place across a social network developed using real data about the population under consideration, and essential services are implemented as objects within the model allowing for experimentation with different courses of action for development of civil service capacity. We describe the theoretical underpinnings of the model, the current state of implementation, potential use cases, and the path forward for future work.