Modeling population displacement in the Syrian city of Aleppo

The persistent crisis in Syria has affected millions of its citizens by forcing their displacement from native or accustomed residences. Modeling the Syrian conflict provides a computational means to better understand why, when, and where these citizens flee. Thus, an agent-based model drawn on real-world data to represent Syrian cities (the environment) and the demographic constitution of those cities (the agents) has been developed and is explained in this discussion. The outputs of the model accurately reflect population displacement as it occurred in 2013. Importantly, the purpose of this agent-based modeling and the output analysis is to develop a means to anticipate, measure, and assess future displacement in Syria as well as to model other threatened populations in crises where displacement might occur. This paper presents the methodology to crafting the environment and agents to represent the Syrian city of Aleppo and the displacement of its citizens.