Amanda Geppert and Daniel Erwin collaborated on this exploration of inner-city violence to improve the ability of CeaseFire, a violence prevention organization, to stop shootings and killings in the communities it serves.
Agent-based modeling is an analytical approach that uses detailed knowledge of the behaviors of large numbers of actors to derive the structure of a complex system.
The authors created a participatory simulation which informed a computational simulation with NetLogo, an open-source modeling software.
The model was verified and validated through comparison with observed real-world behaviors. The authors propose a more detailed model that would incorporate data from the CeaseFire archives in order to gain a clearer understanding of how CeaseFire workers impact violence.