Re: solitary anima modelling

[M Lang / S Railsback]

Guru Prasad wrote:
> 
>  I'm modelling the foraging movements of a solitary animal over a  dynamic
> network - like canopy labyrinthe, with multiple resource parameters. Would
> using the swarm concept make my job easier?
> Regards,

We've written a Swarm model with multiple fish moving through a river
network, which may be similar. Most Swarm models involve multiple agents
but there is no reason you cannot simulate just one animal. (And it
would be easy to make multiple animals.) Some of the things Swarm will
make easier for you are:

a. Providing a standard modeling structure and framework, making it
easier to describe your model and easier to share code with other users
(like us). Certainly, an object-oriented approach seems very beneficial
for your model.

b. Displaying the state of the model over time- where the animal is, the
state of the network. You can easily display the network (at least in
two dimensions) and perhaps color-code each segment by some habitat
variable. (Or draw the network in several different windows, each
displaying a different resource parameter.)

c. Taking care of lots of little things like random number generation
that would otherwise take up a lot of your time to program.

Other people have done quite a bit of network modeling and perhaps could
help with designing & coding your network. For our river system, (
http://math.humboldt.edu/~simsys/Chinook.html ) we simply read in the
coordinates of each end of each segment, and wrote some simple code that
built the network. Each segment kept 4 Swarm "list" objects that
maintained the links among segments: each segment had one list of other
segments that had their downstream end connected to its upstream end, a
list of segments with their downstream end connected to its downstream
end, etc. Animals reaching the end of one segment simply looked at that
segment's lists to find out which other segments they could move into.

Feel free to ask more questions.

Steve Railsback
-- 
address@hidden
Lang, Railsback & Assoc.
250 California Ave., Arcata CA 95521
707-822-0453; Fax 822-1868

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