The ACSES Model of Afghanistan: The Model Operation, Synthetic Population, Calibration, and Surprises

Abstract

In this chapter, we continue the description of the ACSES model of citizen allegiance in the presence of an insurgency in Afghanistan. Here, we show how the social theories and actor models presented in the previous chapter were implemented for the specific case of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan in an agent-based model. We address four main topics. First, we present and narrate a flowchart of the model. Second, we describe creation of the synthetic population, so that the model would have some fidelity and relevance to the target scenario. Third, we discuss how we calibrated the model using real-world data, concentrating on the genetic algorithm technique that was most fruitful. Finally, we discuss some instances of surprise that we found using the ACSES model, as an example of some of the benefits of this approach.