Sustainability policy-making as a dynamic, agent-based system of systems

Ideally, government policy is intended to improve economic, environmental, or social sustainability outcomes. Effective policy must address the ways that individual citizens, industries, and other government agencies will respond, and they must consider the implications on market systems, social systems, and ecosystems. This paper describes a system of systems approach to modeling and analyzing policy decision-making, seeking to combine elements from agent-based and system dynamics modeling approaches. The decentralized approach of agent-based model construction combined with feedback loop identification from system dynamics can offer a meaningful way to view and model sustainability-centric policy-making. The U.S. automobile markets are discussed in this context, considering both safety and fuel economy regulations.