
to these mission environments; therefore it is 
important to state that these models and the previous 
considerations could be effectively tailored and 
applied also in relation to civil scenarios where new 
investment (i.e. industries and infrastructures) have 
to be plan over a domestic  region or a district as 
well as during promotional campaign in marketing 
initiatives. 
2 SIMULATION OBJECTIVES 
Therefore the international context in unstable areas 
introduce a good motivation to investigate these 
population models (i.e.country reconstruction 
operations); currently there it is expected that these 
models could be very useful for evaluating 
alternative planning considering risk, opportunities, 
times, resources costs over a complex and stochastic 
framework, vice versa the predictive capability of 
these simulators is still pretty limited  due to the 
high degree of uncertainty affecting human elements 
and the high influence of specific spot events 
(Bruzzone and Massei, 2010). Due to these 
considerations, the proposed agent-driven 
simulations are devoted to conduct experimental 
analysis and decision support by providing reliable 
estimations and useful risk analysis, but not the of 
the exact time and location of a new riot; indeed 
these events are generated usually by an ignition 
factor that is highly unpredictable (i.e. a single 
phrase or shot in a specific moment). 
Considering the proposed context it is evident 
that nowadays military mission environments, 
especially within countries characterized by different 
cultures, society organization and changeable 
political situations, require a new approach to 
tactical and strategic operations which not only 
appreciates military engagements, but also 
relationship between civil population, military forces 
as well as community evolution and interest groups. 
The problem of this analysis is that there are not 
universally accepted simulation models and that the 
human behaviour modifiers (HBM) are very difficult 
to be represented; in addition it is even necessary to 
create models of specific operations that are 
currently not covered by the existing simulators in 
order to take of Civil-Military Cooperation, 
INFOPS, PSYOPS as well as of psychological 
consequences over population during mission 
execution; therefore some existing model/simulator 
is currently taking into account these not-kinetic 
operations, but usually it is just a qualitative on/off 
parameters or a manual script affecting the scenario 
evolution; this obviously don’t allow to consider the 
complex dynamic of the interaction among different 
interest groups that is the basis for situation 
evolution. 
3 APPLICATION FRAMEWORK 
AND PROPOSED APPROACH 
The simulator should consider for instance that 
digging a well within an area could generate positive 
effects on some part of population (i.e. people hired 
to carried out the work, owner of the land) as well as 
negative effects on other ones (i.e. opposite clan 
respect well owner, opposite political party respect 
that one involved); these actions generated direct 
impact on element of the population living in the 
area as well as on the their related interest group and 
in addition produce a cascade effect on all the social 
networks among people and interest groups. In 
addition if due to weather conditions and/or lack of 
resource the well constructions result to be affected 
by delays this could produce negative impact on the 
people that expect the completion to get benefits of 
this asset. 
All these elements as well as the cascade of 
effects could result positive or negative with a strong 
influence due to the dynamically evolving 
relationships among people and interest groups and 
also due to the importance of the specific actions, 
the cultural background and the communications 
(Seck et al., 2005). 
Indeed the diffusion in the region and among the 
people and interest groups of the effects of the 
actions is modelled based on communications over 
different supports (face to face, media, phones) and 
considering specific factors; therefore these 
communications introduces attenuation factors and 
delays; due to the computational workload (i.e. in 
our case 300’000 people and 60 interest groups) the 
cascade effect could slow down simulation on single 
workstations, for this reason it is possible to run the 
simulation with correct diffusion models or by 
considering that the diffusion happen with fixed 
stochastic delays along each single operation phase 
(this reduces of drastically the events to be 
considered); considering multiple actions on going 
concurrently and the main interest to measure final 
effects this simplification resulted acceptable, 
therefore if computation power is available it is 
possible to run the simulator using more correct 
models. 
In the proposed models it was required to model 
these elements and to create a simulation able to 
SocialLayersandPopulationModelsDirectedbyIntelligentAgentsforEstimatingtheImpactofOperationsand
Investments
413