A dynamic exploratory hybrid modelling framework for simulating complex and uncertain system

Abstract

Complex disaster systems involve various components and mechanisms that could interact in complex ways and change over time, leading to significant deep uncertainty. Due to deep uncertainty, decision-makers have severe inadequacy of knowledge and often encounter unpredictable surprises that may emerge in the future, thus making it difficult to specify appropriate models and parameters to describe the system of interest. In this paper, we propose a dynamic exploratory hybrid modeling framework that fits data, models, and computational experiments together to simulate complex systems with deep uncertainty. In the framework, one needs to develop multiple plausible models from a hybrid modeling perspective and perform enormous computational experiments to explore the diversity of future scenarios. Real-time data is then incorporated into diverse forecasts to dynamically adjust the simulation system. This ultimately enables an ongoing modeling and analysis process in which deep uncertainty would be gradually mitigated. Our approach has been applied to a human-involved car-following system simulation under complex traffic conditions. The results show that the proposed approach can improve the prediction accuracy while enhancing the sensitivity of the simulation system to uncertain changes in the system of interest.