JISC

Social simulation is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field with applications across the academic research community. Both micro-simulation and agent-based modelling have been widely adopted within economics, sociology and geography. Simulation models have also provoked high levels of interest in healthcare research, anthropology and political science. Policy interest is substantial within the public and private sector.

The NeISS (National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation) project will build a generic production quality social simulation e-Infrastructure covering the social simulation lifecycle. It will introduce social scientists to new ways of thinking about social problems, and provide new services, tools and research communities to support them. It will provide an e-Infrastructure framework capable of being deployed for a diverse range of social research domains (i.e., not limited to simulation). The tools will enable researchers to create workflows to run their own simulations, visualise and analyse results, and publish them for future discovery, sharing and re-use. This will facilitate development and sharing of social simulation resources within the social science community, encourage cooperation between model developers and researchers, and help foster adoption of simulation as a research method in the social sciences, and as a decision support tool in the public and private sectors.

Challenges that NeISS will address include: curation, sharing and re-use of simulation outputs (publishing); design and implementation of standards for sharing data and methods (portals); developing methods for controlled access to information which may be private, confidential, or copyright (security); effective manipulation of complex simulation outputs across multiple service components (workflows); providing real-time access to powerful computational resources (core services); facilitating access to research resources and expertise among a distributed community of users (sharing and collaboration). Sustainability will be addressed through a number of interrelated community and capacity building activities: implementing an architecture conformant with relevant standards, enabling social scientists to contribute data, develop and share models and services; exploring connections to learning and teaching in the social sciences, such as postgraduate courses; a coordinated programme of outreach and training events; developing business models that cater for the growing numbers of public and private sector users of simulation.

The NeISS project will build directly on the activities, deliverables, and synergies which emerged from the ESRC-funded “e-Infrastructure for the Social Sciences” project, bringing together experts in social simulation, service-oriented computing, community engagement, capacity building and sustainability, productionising software, project management and public engagement in a vastly experienced, multi-disciplinary team.