Completed BBCSS Project

Organizational Models From Individuals to Societies

Publication: Behavioral Modeling and Simulation: From Individuals to Societies

View slides from the May 2, 2008 public briefing/report release: Click to view slides.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has asked the National Research Council to establish a study committee to identify the technical requirements and outline an R&D program for developing a new generation of militarily-relevant societal behavior models that incorporate current knowledge of individual human behavior and collective organizational behavior, in a computational framework informed by modern modeling and simulation practices. A key goal will be to bring together communities that are currently focusing on different aspects of this problem to include anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and modelers of individual, organizational, and network behavior. The committee's task will focus on (1) assessing the state of the art in understanding and modeling human/organizational behavior; (2) providing a means by which the models of one research community can be informed by the concepts and knowledge of others; and (3) recommending a framework for developing large scale "societal" models that reflect our knowledge of both individual human behavior and communal organizational behavior.