A Coupled Food Security and Refugee Movement Model for the South Sudan Conflict

We investigate, through data sets correlation analysis, how relevant to the simulation of refugee dynamics the food situation is. Armed conflicts often imply difficult food access conditions for the population, which can have a great impact on the behaviour of the refugees, as is the case in South Sudan. To test our approach, we adopt the Flee agent-based simulation code, combining it with a data-driven food security model to enhance the rule set for determining refugee movements. We test two different approaches for South Sudan and find promising yet negative results. While our first approach to modelling refugees response to food insecurity do not improve the error of the simulation development approach, we show that this behaviour is highly non-trivial and properly understanding it could determine the development of reliable models of refugee dynamics.