Placing people in the environment: Coupling agent-based land-use and Earth system models

Conferences CoMSES 2017
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Presenter: Nicolas Gauthier

Part of the Panel on Simulation in Archaeology

Models:

None

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Hi Nicolas,I liked your talk very much. I have a question about the ABM tools you are currently using (or are considering to use) to implement the coupling with ESM. Did you look at several options among the existing ABM platforms?
Best
Clp

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I currently use NetLogo for its ease of use with prototyping, but none of the concepts discussed in the video are platform specific. This will continue to be the case as long as the ABM - ESM coupling is “off-line” (the two models run incrementally and asynchronously, land-surface data are manually moved between the two sets of models as needed) – I don’t yet see a need to move to fully automatic “on-line” simulations. That said, I think a Python-based platform such as Mesa is the most promising for on-line simulation, because the ESM community has already begun to converge on Python as a standard for handling model inputs and outputs.

And insofar as the performance of different ABM platforms is a concern … I wouldn’t be concerned. A model year in an ESM will always take much longer to compute than a model year in the ABM, regardless of which language the latter is implemented in, so a marginal increase in ABM performance would do little to cut down on total simulation time.

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