Considering the needs and culture of the local population in contemporary military interventions simulations: an agent-based modeling approach

International audienceIn the context of increasingly complex human environments faced by the armed forces tasked with implementing peacebuilding missions in various locations around the world, operations of influence, which are non-violent undertakings aimed at conquering the support of the locals through use of trust, persuasion and material assistance, are more than ever a vital approach for successful military action. As such, they require specific and complete training and designing a computational tool to this end offers opportunity for innovative modeling of cultural complexity. This chapter presents and describes how a local culture and its specifics are delineat-ed and represented in the SICOMORES multi-agent system and covers the issue of human needs as a socio-cultural phenomenon. It is proposed that culture has to be approached at several levels that are entwined and has to be represented accordingly in the agent population, while the culturally dependent aspect of needs can be bypassed in order to produce a universal set of needs for the context of conflict affecting civilian populations. It is then possible to computationally use these theoretically well-grounded elements to generate with a high level of detail the effects of actions of influence directed at the agents as cognitive processes