Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

23 Representing Socio‐Behavioral Understanding with Models

Andreas Tolk¹ and Christopher G. Glazner²

¹ Modeling, Simulation, Experimentation, and Analytics, The MITRE Corporation, Hampton, VA, 23666, USA

² Modeling, Simulation, Experimentation and Analytics, The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, 22103, USA

Introduction

Scientific work in all domains follows a set of common principles and guidelines that ensure high‐quality research, dissemination of the results, and the general contribution to the archived body of knowledge that provides a comprehensive and concise representation of concepts, terms, and activities needed to make up a professional scientific domain. Therefore, scientific work requires one to comprehend, share, and reproduce research results to increase knowledge over time. Given the complexity of the world around us, this is often accomplished using models that represent a scientific theory in a more generally comprehensible and testable form. In his work, Goldman (2006) describes the development of science as a series of models that either evolve by integrating new research results or that must be replaced due to revolutionary new insights by new models.

The use of simulation in support of such efforts is increasingly accepted in engineering disciplines (Mittal et al. 2017). Computational sciences allow the execution of hypotheses or theories that are captured in a mathematical model and implemented in a computer program, demonstrating a causal link ...