Architectural considerations for agent-based national scale policy models : LDRD final report.

Technical Report · Sat Sep 01 04:00:00 EDT 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/920446· OSTI ID:920446

Backus, George A; Strip, David R

The need to anticipate the consequences of policy decisions becomes ever more important as the magnitude of the potential consequences grows. The multiplicity of connections between the components of society and the economy makes intuitive assessments extremely unreliable. Agent-based modeling has the potential to be a powerful tool in modeling policy impacts. The direct mapping between agents and elements of society and the economy simplify the mapping of real world functions into the world of computation assessment. Our modeling initiative is motivated by the desire to facilitate informed public debate on alternative policies for how we, as a nation, provide healthcare to our population. We explore the implications of this motivation on the design and implementation of a model. We discuss the choice of an agent-based modeling approach and contrast it to micro-simulation and systems dynamics approaches.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 920446
• Report Number(s): SAND2007-5847
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
DECISION MAKING
Decision making-Computer simulation.
Decision making-Mathematical models.
GOVERNMENT POLICIES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
PUBLIC HEALTH
Policies.
Policy sciences.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS