NISAC Agent-Based Laboratory for Economics (N-ABLE™)
National Economic Security
Toward developing a better understanding of the impacts of infrastructure vulnerabilities and disruptions on national economic security, NISAC has developed N-ABLE™, a large-scale microeconomic simulation tool that captures complex internal supply chain and market dynamics of businesses in the U.S. economy.
N-ABLE™ models the economy down to the level of the individual firm; each N-ABLE™ firm is complete with individual buyers, production supervisors, sellers, and strategic planners who collectively navigate through economic disruption and recovery. N-ABLE™’s simulations of thousands to millions of firms provide the fidelity necessary to understand and implement the best infrastructure policies.
A “Laboratory” for Policy Analysis
N-ABLE has been used to answer economic policy-related questions such as:- Which industries and economic regions are affected most by an infrastructure disruption?
- How do infrastructure constraints or industry constraints prolong economic recovery?
- Are small firms hurt more than large firms? Which are most influential on economic stability?
- What are the most effective loss prevention and mitigation strategies for individual firms?
N-ABLE is currently being used to analyze the economic impacts of:
- Changes in U.S. Border Security technologies on domestic firms
- Terrorist acts on commodity futures markets
- Transportation disruptions on regional agriculture and food supply chains
- Electric power and rail transportation disruptions on chemical supply chains
- Optimized military supply chains.
NISAC recently completed an N-ABLE™ analysis of a national chemical supply chain involving 3,000 firms, or an estimated 10,000 firm-level business decision makers (e.g., buyers, sellers, and production supervisors). Collaborating with industry and other subject matter experts, simulations were conducted of disruptions to the transportation infrastructure and regional electric power system.
Results indicated that if shippers could, in times of need, expedite orders at a cost to themselves, the supply chain would significantly benefit from:
- reduced in-transit chemical which can be targeted by terrorists
- reduced time to recover from disruption
- lower on-site inventory levels
Real-Time Collaborative Analysis
N-ABLE™ provides a rich simulation environment for nationwide, collaborative analysis. As NISAC analysts develop and conduct simulations, subject matter experts and stakeholders stationed across the country can view and share results in real time, conduct additional simulations and collectively synthesize and document analysis results.
Extended Features
N-ABLE™ is based on an extensible data-driven software architecture that allows for rapid development of new types of firms, households, and infrastructure; real-time distributed simulation with third-party transportation, electric power, and other network models; and “human in the loop” simulations, where analysts can participate in a simulation as some or all of the agents.
