The aim of the project is to develop a user-friendly policy simulation system allowing forecasting and visualizing the socio-economic potential impact of public policies. This will allow policy makers to make experiments with different socio-economic designs, with the participation of citizens and potentially impacted stakeholders, before a public policy is settled. It will also allow the different stakeholders to participate into the process and better understand different scenarios possible and their side effects. Focus will be set on SME-oriented policies in order to manage the scope of R&D activities. They have been selected given the importance of SMEs in EU Economy, and the R&D potential given by the nature of policies and impacts addressing this collective. Combining suitable data, models, artificial intelligence and interactive visualization tools, the final goal is to develop a “policy wind tunnel”. MOSIPS system will be suited to craft policy options, giving social and economic stakeholders a decision arena visualizing and illustrating policy insights, providing valuable decision-support, as it will make counter-intuitive feedback, cascading and side effects understandable. MOSIPS will be able to significantly improve the quality of policies implemented by public authorities at any administrative level, and at the same time, facilitate access to meaningful information to citizens about the expected consequences of policies designed for the region/locality/country/area they live at, promoting their engagement and active participation in the policy-making and implementation process. Concrete S&T objectives are related to the consecution of this project aim, mainly dealing with the areas of modelling, multi-agent based intelligent and dynamic simulation, visual technologies for data analysis and real-time interaction with simulation engines, citizens’ empowerment, software certification and the paradigm of Software as a Service and related ICT areas.
