PROTON

The European project PROTON proposed an innovative approach which mixes social and computer sciences to assess policies that prevent the recruitment into organised crime (OC) and terrorist networks (TN). The first half of the project conducted systematic analyses of the literature and innovative studies to understand what leads individuals into OC and TN. Based on these results, the second half of the project developed agent-based models (ABM) to simulate the recruitment processes and to test specific preventive policies. PROTON benefited from the interaction between researchers and policy makers to ensure the research addresses policy-relevant issues.

PROTON’s final results include:

• PROTON-S, two ABMs which simulate the processes leading to the recruitment into OC and TN, respectively, and test the impact of specific preventive scenarios;
• PROTON Wizard, a user-friendly web interface which allows policy makers and interested stakeholders to easily navigate through the results of PROTON-S and test different scenarios.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N° 699824.