Formal Representation of Water Withdrawal Policies for Integrated Impact Assessment

International audienceThe regulation of water use and water management has evolved considerably in recent years. The evolution of water regulatory systems includes the design of new management policies, which could benefit from ex-ante comparative impact assessments with regard to those of current or past practices. To this aim, the MAELIA project develops an integrated modelling and simulation platform for the assessment of alternative water management policies, especially during low-water crisis in the Adour-Garonne basin (South-West region of France). The development of such an integrated assessment and modelling platform requires the consideration and integration of many entities and processes involved in the system under consideration - water resources and flows, agricultural structures and activities, state and evolution of land cover and land use, etc. This article focuses on the formal representation of two alternative options regarding the choice of water withdrawal policy, which are likely to have considerable impacts on the whole socio-hydro-system s: management by rate of flow (currently applied); and management by volume quotas (alternative to be assessed). Furthermore, the article presents a conceptual framework for the integrated modelling of such social-ecological systems together with graphical notations for models' representation

GAMA: A Spatially Explicit, Multi-level, Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation Platform

International audienceAgent-based modeling is now widely used to investigate complex systems but still lacks integrated and generic tools to support the representation of features usually associated with real complex systems, namely rich, dynamic and realistic environments or multiple levels of agency. The GAMA platform has been developed to address such issues and allow modelers, thanks to the use of a high-level modeling language, to build, couple and reuse complex models combining various agent architectures, environment representations and levels of abstraction

GAMA: multi-level and complex environment for agent-based models and simulations (demonstration)

International audienceAgent-based models are now used in numerous application domains (ecology, social sciences, etc.) but their use is still impeded by the lack of generic yet ready-to-use tools sup- porting the design and the simulation of complex models in- tegrating multiple level of agency and realistic environments. The GAMA modeling and simulation platform is proposed to address such issues. It allows modelers to build com- plex models thanks to high-level modeling language, various agent architectures and advanced environment representa- tions and built-in multi-level support

Integrated modelling of social-ecological systems: The MAELIA high-resolution multi-agent platform to deal with water scarcity problems

International audienceSustainable water resource management is typical of environmental management problems emerging from complex social-ecological systems. It deeply depends upon water user strategies, land use management and water governance systems. MAELIA, a "policy issue" modelling platform, allows performing integrated assessment at watershed level of a wide range of scenarios regarding water and land use management strategies in combination with global changes. It has been developed through a strong analysis of different French water management situations and an inductive modelling process. It allows representing dynamic interactions between human activities (farming practices), ecological processes (hydrology and crop growth), and governance systems (water regulations and releases from dams) at fine spatiotemporal resolutions in order to handle actual problems of water managers and issues of the main water users (farmers). MAELIA includes original farmer, dam manager and state services (software) agents

GAMA: multi-level and complex environment for agent-based models and simulations (demonstration)

Agent-based models are now used in numerous application domains (ecology, social sciences, etc.) but their use is still impeded by the lack of generic yet ready-to-use tools supporting the design and the simulation of complex models integrating multiple level of agency and realistic environments. The GAMA modeling and simulation platform is proposed to address such issues. It allows modelers to build complex models thanks to high-level modeling language, various agent architectures and advanced environment representations and built-in multi-level support

The MAELIA multi-agent platform for integrated assessment of low-water management issues

International audienceThe MAELIA project is developing an agent-based modeling and simulation platform to study the environmental, economic and social impacts of various regulations regarding water use and water management in combination with climate change. It is applied to the case of the French Adour-Garonne Basin, which is the most concerned in France by water scarcity during the low-water period. An integrated approach has been chosen to model this social-ecological system: the model combines spatiotemporal models of ecologic (e.g. rainfall and temperature changes, water flow and plant growth) and socio-economic (e.g. farmer decision-making process, management of low-water flow, demography, land use and land cover changes) processes and sub-models of cognitive sharing among agents (e.g. weather forecast, normative constraints on behaviors

Impact Assessment Modeling of Low-Water Management Policy

International audienceWe briefly present the main steps involved in designing and developing a platform for the numerical simulation of environmental and social impacts of the implementation of new environmental norms related to low-water management in France (MAELIA Project: multi-agents for environmental norms impact assessment). Some results are highlighted concerning in particular the structure of the underlying low-water management model and the process and agents' activity modeling

Formal Representation of Water Withdrawal Policies for Integrated Impact Assessment

International audienceThe regulation of water use and water management has evolved considerably in recent years. The evolution of water regulatory systems includes the design of new management policies, which could benefit from ex-ante comparative impact assessments with regard to those of current or past practices. To this aim, the MAELIA project develops an integrated modelling and simulation platform for the assessment of alternative water management policies, especially during low-water crisis in the Adour-Garonne basin (South-West region of France). The development of such an integrated assessment and modelling platform requires the consideration and integration of many entities and processes involved in the system under consideration - water resources and flows, agricultural structures and activities, state and evolution of land cover and land use, etc. This article focuses on the formal representation of two alternative options regarding the choice of water withdrawal policy, which are likely to have considerable impacts on the whole socio-hydro-system s: management by rate of flow (currently applied); and management by volume quotas (alternative to be assessed). Furthermore, the article presents a conceptual framework for the integrated modelling of such social-ecological systems together with graphical notations for models' representation

GAMA: multi-level and complex environment for agent-based models and simulations (demonstration)

International audienceAgent-based models are now used in numerous application domains (ecology, social sciences, etc.) but their use is still impeded by the lack of generic yet ready-to-use tools sup- porting the design and the simulation of complex models in- tegrating multiple level of agency and realistic environments. The GAMA modeling and simulation platform is proposed to address such issues. It allows modelers to build com- plex models thanks to high-level modeling language, various agent architectures and advanced environment representa- tions and built-in multi-level support