Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations
Simulated environment
Purdue University's Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS, sometimes referred to and reported on as Sentient World Simulation, is currently being used by the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Defense to simulate crises on the US mainland. SEAS "enables researchers and organizations to try out their models or techniques in a publicly known, realistically detailed environment." It "is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence. [...] The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people."
SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. Then it was used to help "recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers". In 2004 SEAS was evaluated for its ability to help simulate "the non-kinetic aspects of combat, things like the diplomatic, economic, political, infrastructure and social issues".
Sentient World Simulation is the name given to the current vision of making SEAS a "continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action."
Development and use
SEAS technology resulted from over ten years of research at Purdue University, funded by the Department of Defense, several Fortune 500 companies, the National Science Foundation, the Century Fund of the state of Indiana, and the Office of Naval Research. Originally, SEAS was developed to help Fortune 500 companies with strategic planning. It was also used to model the population of the U.S. that is eligible for military service to help "recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers" and to study biological attacks.
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