The Nexus Game

The worldwide use of decision games, or often called Serious Games ('games that do not have entertainment as their primary purpose'), is becoming more popular and allows players/stakeholders to experience situations that are impossible in the real world for reasons of safety, cost, time or their rare occurrence. Examples of Serious Gaming applications include domains as diverse as healthcare, public policy, defence, training and education. In contrast to traditional Game Theory or Operations Research where scenarios or problems are typically well structured, serious gaming can simulate more complex, dynamic, uncertain, socially-coupled scenarios, referred to as "wicked problems" that are prevalent in the real world.

Water supply and demand, food production and energy provision and consumption are intimately linked physically, socially and economically, forming the Water-Food-Energy Nexus, an interconnected system that is increasingly a cause for concern due to projected demand growth. Strategic decision making for planning and management of infrastructure supporting the Water-Food-Energy the Nexus is an example of such wicked problems. It can, therefore, benefit from leveraging the technical strengths of simulation models and the social strengths of multi-player/stakeholder engagement in a game execution.

The Serious Gaming approach offers potentially transformative capabilities to strategic decision-support tools to provide better management of complex infrastructure systems compared to purely technical simulation or optimisation methods that have difficulty in capturing the socio-technical challenges of complex systems. The Nexus Game will simulate the evolution of the Nexus system with player(s) interfering in a system's dynamics through various choice variables/interventions. This represents a paradigm shift not only from the approaches that focus solely on technical issues, but also a shift from policy and regulatory regimes that concentrate on individual Nexus components separately.

The project will focus on UK water infrastructure and water security within the Water-Food-Energy Nexus (i.e., how it could be achieved; possible future scenarios, threats, synergies, uncertainties; what policy approaches can/should be developed and applied, etc). Thus it would directly address a major societal challenge: how should the UK achieve its basic provisioning of water/food/energy in the future, but with a particular focus on water, a strategic question of great importance to any society. Water security is also vital to future UK economic success and environmental integrity as failure to achieve security could have dire consequences for other sectors.

The use of Serious Gaming in water engineering and management is in very early stages and requires initial research and development to explore the potential of this exciting approach. This project will deliver a fast turnaround and open this new approach to wider audiences of policy makers, water engineers and other scientists involved in water research and management. This project will also deliver impact nationally (policy-based research) and internationally (by highlighting issues associated with the interdependencies between water, food and energy), which is a key goal of the EPSRC strategic plan. Furthermore, national excellence in simulation and modelling for water engineering applications, with significant international academic impact, will be strengthened because this project combines, uniquely, technical and socio-economic considerations into a single, complexity modelling framework taking account of societies having to adapt national infrastructure for environmental (climate) change.