Simulation technology helps predict the destinations of refugees escaping conflict

What is it about?

Researchers at Brunel University London, Diana Suleimenova, Dr David Bell and Dr Derek Groen from the Department of Computer Science, used publicly available refugee, conflict and geospatial data to construct simulations of refugee movements and their potential destinations for African countries. The data-driven simulation tool consistently managed to predict at least 75% of refugee destinations correctly after the first 12 days for three different recent African conflicts. It also out-performed alternative existing forecasting techniques (‘naïve predictions’) to predict where, when and how many refugees are likely to arrive, and which camps are likely to become full. They reported their results in Scientific Reports.

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Why is it important?

This simulation development approach helps organisations to rapidly develop simulations when a conflict occurs, and allows them to investigate the effect of border closures between countries and forced redirection of refugees across camps. It also helps them to define procedures for collecting data and validating simulation results, aspects which are usually not covered when presenting a simulation model alone.