Communications of the ACM
The Scientists Who Simulate the End of the World
The U.S. National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center models how national infrastructure and human behavior would be affected by attacks or catastrophes.
Credit: Pandemic Influenza and Complex Adaptive System of Systems (CASoS) Engineering, by Robert Glass
The U.S. National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC) models how national infrastructure and human behavior would be affected by attacks or catastrophes ranging from cyber-sieges to global pandemics to severe weather.
The analytical discipline developed at NISAC, founded in 1999, is known as Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems (CASoS), which applies chaos theory and other concepts to real-world problems as they transpire. CASoS uses modern computing resources to simulate not only billions of actors and systems, but also how those systems interact globally, as well as their adaptation patterns based on ecosystem-wide dynamic changes.
One application of CASoS by NISAC was a model of a global avian flu pandemic in 2005 to test a hypothesis that the best aversion strategy would be thinning the potential network of infectees.
NISAC reflects the importance to the federal government of predicting how adaptive systems will respond to and evolve from disruptions, and some issues involve simulating human behavior at times of crisis.
NISAC's modus operandi is to develop a program with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security outlining the topics it might study for that year to create a document other federal agencies can use in a crisis. For example, the work of NISAC in the decades ahead could focus on developing predictive tools cities can use to model and adapt to extreme weather.
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Abstracts Copyright © 2016 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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