Facilitating simulation development for global challenge response and anticipation in a timely way

Abstract

An important subset of today’s global crises, such as the 2015 migration crisis in Syria and the 2020 COVID pandemic, has a rapid and hard-to-extrapolate evolution that complicates the preparation of a community response. Simulation-based forecasts for such crises can help to guide the selection or development of mitigation policies or inform the efficient allocation of support resources. However, the time required to develop, execute and validate these models can often be intractably long, causing many of these forecasts to only become accurate after the damage has already occurred. In this paper, we present a generic simulation development approach (or SDA) to tackle this challenge. It consists of three important phases: identifying anticipatory activities required for developing application-agnostic modelling tools, identifying activities required to adapt these models to address specific (global) challenges, and automating a large subset of the aforementioned activities using existing software tool. Here, a key aspect is to ensure that our models are reliable: this involves a range of tasks for validation, ensemble forecasting, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. To showcase the added value of a generic simulation development approach, we present and discuss two specific applications of this approach: one in the context of modelling conflict-driven migration and one in the context of modelling the spread of COVID-19.