An Agent-Based Simulation Platform for a Safe Election: From Design to Simulation

IF 2.4 Q3 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS Information (Switzerland) Pub Date : 2023-09-28 DOI:10.3390/info14100529
Ali V. Barenji, Benoit Montreuil, Sevda Babalou, Dima Nazzal, Frederick Benaben, Richard DeMillo
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Abstract

Managing the logistics and safety of an election system, from delivering voting machines to the right locations at the right time to ensuring that voting lines remain reasonable in length is a complex problem due to the scarcity of resources, especially human poll workers, and the impact of human behavior and disrupting events on the performance of this critical system. These complexities grew with the need for physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic coinciding with multiple key national elections, including the 2020 general presidential election in the USA. In this paper, we propose a digital clone platform leveraging agent-based simulation to model and experiment with resource allocation decisions and voter turnout fluctuations and facilitate “what-if” scenario testing of any election. As a use case, we consider three different concurrent polling location problems, namely, resource allocation, polling layout, and management. The main aim is to reduce voter waiting time and provide visibility of different scenarios for polling and state-level managers. We explain the proposed simulation platform based on Fulton County for the 2020 presidential US election. Fulton County had 238 polling locations in 2020, which provided publicly available voter turnout data. The developed platform realistically models at the county level and at specific locations, suggesting the possible allocation of finite resources among locations in the county and the configuration of each location, accounting for physical, legal, and technical constraints. Multiple realistic scenarios were developed and embedded into the simulation platform to evaluate and verify the different systems. The system performance and key attributes of the election system, such as waiting time, resource utilization, and layout safety, were tested and validated.
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基于agent的安全选举仿真平台:从设计到仿真
管理选举系统的后勤和安全,从在正确的时间将投票机运送到正确的地点,到确保投票队伍保持合理的长度,是一个复杂的问题,因为资源稀缺,特别是人类投票工作人员,以及人类行为和干扰事件对这一关键系统性能的影响。在2019冠状病毒病大流行期间,包括2020年美国总统大选在内的多个关键全国选举期间,需要保持身体距离,这些复杂性随之增加。在本文中,我们提出了一个数字克隆平台,利用基于智能体的模拟对资源分配决策和选民投票率波动进行建模和实验,并促进对任何选举的“假设”场景进行测试。作为一个用例,我们考虑三个不同的并发轮询位置问题,即资源分配、轮询布局和管理。主要目的是减少选民等待时间,并为投票和州级管理人员提供不同场景的可见性。我们解释了基于富尔顿县的2020年美国总统大选的拟议模拟平台。2020年,富尔顿县有238个投票站,提供了公开的选民投票率数据。开发的平台实际地在县一级和特定地点进行建模,建议在县的各个地点之间分配有限资源和每个地点的配置,考虑到物理、法律和技术限制。开发了多个现实场景并将其嵌入到仿真平台中,以评估和验证不同的系统。对系统性能和选举系统的关键属性如等待时间、资源利用率、布局安全性等进行了测试和验证。
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来源期刊
Information (Switzerland)
Information (Switzerland) Computer Science-Information Systems
CiteScore
6.90
自引率
0.00%
发文量
515
审稿时长
11 weeks
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