Global systems Rapid Assessment tools through Constraint FUnctional Languages

Objective

The making of policies coping with Global Systems is a process that necessarily involves stakeholders from diverse disciplines, each with their own interests, constraints and objectives. People play a central role in such collective decision making and the quest for solutions to a problem generally intertwines its very specification.
Simulators can assist in this process provided they employ adequate high-level modelling to separate the political question from the underlying scientific details. Domain-specific Languages (DSL) embedded in Functional Programming (FP) languages offer a promising way to implement scalable and verifiable simulators. But the use of simulators is essentially a trial-and-error process too tedious for execution in a group session. A paradigm shift is needed towards active problem solving where stakeholders’ objectives can be taken along from the very beginning. Constraint Programming (CP) has demonstrated to enable such a shift for e.g. managed physical systems like water and power networks.
This project lays the base for a DSL aimed at building scalable Rapid Assessment Tools for collective policy making in global systems. This can be achieved through foundational scientific work at different levels: from the high-level, political modelling, adapting the social discipline of Group Model Building (as used in business organizations), through visual forms of CP as well as gamification aspects, down to the needs for a host language, combining CP and FP. Special emphasis is put on domain-specific constraints, constraint composition, and composable solvers and heuristics.
Results are applied and validated for the problem case of Climate-Resilient Urban Design, but the ambition is a general framework applicable to many other systems. The case study is assessed by an external multi-disciplinary Advisory Board of Stakeholders that guides the specification process and evaluates needs and usability of the tools.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

• humanitieslanguages and literaturegeneral language studies
• humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics

Keywords

• Global Systems Science
• Problem Solving
• Collective Policy Making
• Rapid Assessment Tools
• Constraint Programming
• Functional Programming
• Climate-resilient Urban Design
• Group Model Building

Programme(s)

• H2020-EU.1.2. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Main Programme
• H2020-EU.1.2.2. - FET Proactive

Topic(s)

• FETPROACT-1-2014 - Global Systems Science (GSS)

Call for proposal

(opens in new window) H2020-FETPROACT-2014

Funding Scheme

Coordinator

Participants (7)