Infrastructure and Essential Services Economics (IESE)

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is the lead agency for the Cultural Geography project, a Department of Defense initiative designed to better understand the social dynamics of irregular warfare (IW) through computer simulation, both in closed form and in support of interactive, man-in-the-loop “wargames.” TRADOC sought out Argonne’s Decision and Information Sciences Division (DIS) in 2009 to assist in conceptualizing and designing a Cultural Geography modeling capability, based on the division’s track record of success in building simulation systems for highly complex, diverse, and heterogeneous problem-spaces, such as modern agroeconomic dynamics in rural Thailand, settlement system sustainability in the ancient Near East, and the dynamics of the South American cocaine trade.

In mid-2010, TRADOC accepted DIS’s recommendation to design and build an Infrastructure and Essential Services Economics (IESE) simulation engine to interface with other applications in TRADOC’s IW Tactical Wargame simulation suite. In the IESE simulation now under development at DIS, regions of the world under stress (e.g., Helmand Province in Afghanistan) are portrayed at the level of detail of demographically diverse communities and neighborhoods; organizations, such as local governments, nongovernmental organizations, insurgents, and stability forces; explicit supply chains for delivery of essential services; supporting infrastructure networks and facilities; and the social networks that link socioeconomic activities together. IESE simulations are intended to help inform decisions on interventions in such regions and to help train stability force leadership in best regional and local stewardship and development practices. IESE will exist both as an element of the IW Tactical Wargame simulation suite and as a stand-alone application that may be used in related applications (e.g., regional economic development studies and disaster recovery decision aids).

Figure 1 provides a notional example of the structural and dynamic complexities to be modeled for a spatially – and socially – distributed supply chain responsible for providing one essential service: access to food for elements of the civil population.

1. Representation of the active role of communities in shaping and framing a population’s perceptions and beliefs regarding the adequacy of infrastructure and delivery of essential services.
2. Representation of the multiple roles played by social networks in channeling and modulating societal activities related to infrastructure and essential services.
3. Representation of classical microeconomics themes, such as commodity supply and demand, prices, and employment, within the context of infrastructure development and maintenance and delivery of essential services.
4. Representation of task networks (supply chains, etc.) to model the interlinked social and physical dynamics of infrastructure and essential services processes.
5. Support for the integration within the IESE simulations of physics-based models to explicitly represent such key processes as infrastructure system performance (electrical grids, water and sewer systems, etc.) and evolution over time of natural processes, such as those associated with agriculture, that are intimately interlinked with the social mechanisms of IESE.

A civil population’s perceptions and attitudes about quality and extent of infrastructure and essential services available to it may in general be divergent and inhomogeneous because of inherent differences in infrastructure and service coverage across the landscape of individual human communities in a region, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Here, a simulated regional population is shown as divided into segments with shared “narrative identities” and demographic characteristics, in accordance with TRADOC’s Cultural Geography (CG) project methodology. As Figure 2 illustrates, the IESE model further subdivides these population segments according to their village and urban neighborhood communities.

A portion of the IESE simulation’s software design is portrayed in simplified form in Figure 3. Here, networks of software objects, representing interlinked infrastructure elements and commodity value chain societal activities, are shown connecting in various ways to software objects that represent neighborhoods and communities in order to deliver essential services (ES) to the populace at the local level.