Construction and Validation Environment for Social Simulations (CAVES)

U.S. political and military decision makers need to make decisions about extremely large, complex socio-political systems. Our objective is to enable these decision makers to evaluate and plan courses of action (COAs) with the aid of computer-based simulations that predict the possible effects (including second and third-order effects) of COAs being considered. We propose to develop a suite of tools to support the development, validation and use of such large-scale socio-political models. We will provide tools based on proven modeling technologies that support the development of a variety of socio-political models that range in scale from nations to individual leaders. We will provide analysis tools that use meta-models to support the debugging, understanding, and validation of such models. Finally, we will provide decision-makers who are using the models with additional insights into both the strengths and weaknesses of the models they are using and the kinds of information that they could gather to improve the predictive performance of the models.