Agent

Land managers and institutions are represented explicitly as agents in CRAFTY. Both share a common architecture where agents are made up of a behavioural type (BT) describing their capabilities of decision making, a functional role (FR) characterising the function and role in the system, and a collection of properties.

A land use agent is able to leverage the capitals available on a land parcel (represented as a cell) to provide a range of services. Each agent has a production function as part of its FR, which maps capital levels onto service provision (see section Production). An agent’s benefit according to a given level of service provision can be calculated based on societal demands, overall supply levels and marginal utility functions (see Figure 1). See Table 1 for a complete list of agent variables.

Agent comes as an interface and a default implementation (both in org.volante.abm.agent). The default is currently configurable with different production functions and giving up/giving in thresholds. Agents have ownership of one (or more) cells, and produce services. They compete for land, and sometimes give up.