An agent-based simulation, called the Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), has been used to provide detailed analytical support to a theater-level command to improve operational level decision making in regards to the Political, Military, Economic, Social, Informational, and Infrastructure (PMESII) dimensions of operations. SEAS allows observations from multiple perspectives, which highlights the economic, political and cultural factors that influence military and non-military PMESII outcomes.

One of the goals in support to the theater was to continuously track the current political, economic and cultural climate of the observed world by keeping SEAS data within thirty days of the current real-world date. In order to accomplish this, Simulex, Inc., the developer of SEAS, has developed and implemented a process of continuous validation under which a "Reference World" is tracked within thirty days of the current date by extracting data from multiple heterogeneous sources on a daily basis, injecting real-world events into SEAS over the recent timeline, and using referent data sources to provide assessments of the SEAS outputs.

This paper describes how the validation was conducted and how challenges were encountered/resolved, as well as the shortcomings of the effort. It is the intention that insights gained in this effort can serve to enhance future evolutions of SEAS as well as make contributions to the art and science of ABM validation.