Politika: Social Dynamics Simulation Environment for Policy Design and Analysis

Description

Politika is an interactive, web-based meta-simulation framework for policy analysis and design. It can be used either as a stand-alone component or as an integrated tool with the PolicyCloud platform. Politika uses agent-based, social simulation as the primary analysis tool for evaluating policy alternatives. It decomposes each policy in a hierarchy of goals, objectives and simulation steps. In addition, Politika provides a series of analytic tools that investigate the relation of simulated policy alternative outcomes to policy goals and operationalize the criteria selected by the policy makers to recommend policy decisions.

Politika can be used as a stand-alone that exposes a web client interface. Using this interface, policy makers can: specify, edit, execute or delete a simulation/policy, browse the specifications and the results of simulations/policies stored in the system, upload/download data to/from a simulation, examine raw simulation/policy results, and, compute and visualize simulation/policy analytics. It can also be used as an integrated component with the PolicyCloud platform. In this case, the policy maker can invoke Politika through the development and execution of various analytical functions. These functions can be created in the PolicyCloud platform and include Politika as a link in various toolchains processing policy-related information.