Technology Innovation Project of Crowd Control

In the early 2000’s, an operational research colleague in Valcartier, Quebec won funding for a Technology Innovation Project from Defence Research and Development Canada Headquarters.  Her proposal was to evaluate the usefulness of System Dynamics and Agent Based Modelling for the problem of crowd control using non-lethal weapons.  The Agent Based Modelling was being conducted by a professor and graduate students at Laval University.  The System Dynamics modelling was conducted by a contracted employee working directly with my colleague.  She asked me to be an adviser on the System Dynamics portion of the three-year project.

We developed a complex System Dynamics model of the crowd control using non-lethal weapons problem and published two papers at the System Dynamics Society Conferences in 2007 and 2008.  We also published a paper on Design of Experiments at the 2008 International Data Farming Workshop.

In 2008, the contracted employee and my colleague published a Technical Report for Defence Research and Development Canada.

The Laval team published a couple of conference papers too

The results of both the System Dynamics model and the Agent Based Model were inconclusive with regards to the pros and cons of non-lethal weapons for crowd control.

There was a little money left over after the project was nearly complete.  So my colleague hired my partner in Policy Dynamics to review the System Dynamics model developed by the contractor and then build a new model based on his recommendations which I published as a Technical Note in the Center for Operational Research and Analysis.