Application Background: Understanding Global Interdependency to Promote International Prosperity

• Goal /Aspiration for Project
• Focus the perspective of CASoS Engineering on three areas of international security: 1) nuclear security and nonproliferation, 2) energy security, and 3) food security
• Evaluate and design policy that promotes security in each of these areas at national to global scales in the context of complex global interdependency
• Approach/Methods/Models
• Utilize the generalized CASoS conceptual lens developed over the past three years (similar to those in physics, biology, economics, and other areas of Complexity Science ) to render a global system of nations as entities (nodes) that interact with other entities via links to “neighbor” entities to form a network in which their dependencies and interactions are modeled. Extend the national sub-sector flows (e.g., raw materials, industrial goods, services) to the global scale.
• Incorporate security interactions among government entities where alliances are conceived to reduce the influence of perturbations within member nations
• Implement the conceptual model computationally in the most appropriate mathematical form (from continuous to discrete, system dynamics to agent based with infinite to finite state machines, or approaches that hybridize these forms)
• Analyze model behavior to find policy that promotes system robustness and/or resilience in the face of perturbations
• The set of perturbations imposed must be comprehensive ranging from random shocks at a variety of levels and frequencies in resource production or flows, to slow increases in such shocks as a consequence of climate change, to orchestrated scenarios such as the case of a strategic assault (naming a few).
• Categorize and rank policy approaches and repercussions at different scales (individual nations, regions, the global system) pursuant to analysis results in context of interdependencies
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps
• Initiated in FY11
• Researcher and research prospectus awarded the William J. Perry International Security Fellowship at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) within Stanford University
• Research to be carried out August 2011 through August 2012
• CASoS Goals: General Capabilities
• Nation state model
• Multi-scale exchange model
• Acknowledgements
• In addition to the Perry International Security Fellowship, Sandia National Laboratories is supporting this research over the August 2011 through August 2012 period