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Be Alert and Stay the Course: An Agent-Based Model Exploring Maritime Piracy Countermeasures

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Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (SBP-BRiMS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9708))

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Abstract

Since its origin nearly forty centuries ago maritime piracy continues to threaten global trade, impacting thousands of merchant vessels each year. Increased security on board merchant ships as well as more costly military countermeasures have been deployed with great success around the Horn of Africa, yet the number of incidents occurring within the Gulf of Guinea have recently drastically increased. This paper will present an agent-based model (ABM) simulating merchant vessels sailing within an environment in which a number of pirates and Naval warships are present. Results demonstrate how ABMs can be used to explore the impact of various piracy countermeasures and discover potentially counter-intuitive consequences of different macro-level policies and micro-level decisions. Ultimately this work serves as a proof of concept for using ABMs to assess the efficacy of strategies for combatting maritime piracy and lays the foundation for future models to inform policy and tactics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Warfighter Human System Integration Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA

    Ciara Sibley

Authors
  1. Ciara Sibley
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Correspondence to Ciara Sibley .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA

    Kevin S. Xu

  2. Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    David Reitter

  3. Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Dongwon Lee

  4. University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

    Nathaniel Osgood

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Sibley, C. (2016). Be Alert and Stay the Course: An Agent-Based Model Exploring Maritime Piracy Countermeasures. In: Xu, K., Reitter, D., Lee, D., Osgood, N. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9708. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39931-7_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-39930-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-39931-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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