Creating artificial societies for policy decision support: a research agenda and call to action

The enormous complexity of political decisions, especially with regard to crisis situations, requires innovative concepts for decision support. The focus here is always on people’s well-being. Artificial societies based on agent-based simulation models are a fairly new, forward-looking paradigm for this. Digital twins, on the contrary, are one of the most promising enabling technologies for realizing a seamless integration between the virtual and the physical or biological world. In this paper, we propose an architecture that combines these two concepts to develop a research agenda to address research topics that will allow us to provide more effective decision support systems. We reflect on the current state of development in this area and formulate possible future research directions. A particular focus here is on integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) methods and supporting cross-disciplinary collaboration, as decision support in the political environment is a highly cross-domain task. We conclude this article with a call for action to gain experience with the proposed architecture. We hope that this will encourage greater cross-disciplinary exchange for this important task.