| Prediction of where terrorists are most likely to strike is an issue that concerns planners, law enforcement and government agencies at various levels, and engineers who must design facilities of all kinds. Agent-based modeling, by simulating societal behavior in a community subjected to terrorism, can help estimate the terrorism risk for various types of facilities so resources can be allocated for hardening or otherwise protecting those facilities. MatScape is a two-phase, primarily resource-driven, agent-based model. The environment consists of a rectangular grid on which lie a number of renewable resources. Civilian agents collect, store, and expend resources, moving about and interacting on this community environment. Endogenous terrorist agents are formed from within the civilian agent population using tag-mediated cultural interaction. Terrorist agents conduct surveillance and commit terrorist attacks, thereby generating fear perceived by the civilian population. Security is endogenous and depends on civilian demand. Using incubation and week-to-week simulation, the simulation process was carried out for three proof-of-concept examples on quasi-realistic environments, with the following characteristics: (1) four-resource, single-community without directional links, (2) four-resource, single-community with directional links, and (3) five-resource, twin-community without directional links. Societal and terrorism behaviors were examined and validated where possible. Results suggested that the level of security present on the environment is sensitive to the attack rate, magnitude, and location. Terrorists conducting attacks are from an extremist subculture. Terrorist attack magnitudes were found to be lognormally distributed, scale invariant, and independent of the time between attacks. Times between attacks are either exponentially or Weibull distributed. The estimated relative risk of terrorist attack, based on the occurrence probability and consequences, at each location on the environments showed definite patterns of intensity across the environment. These patterns are related to agent travel routes, resource distributions, and directional link layout, and hence, could be used to provide insight into the areas most susceptible to terrorist attack. |
