AgroManagement

Quantifying the impact of agricultural management on production and system externalities is the goal of many agricultural modelling studies. Here we consider only those drivers of farmers' decision making that are based on the state of the agricultural system. Agricultural management must be simulated in such a way to mimic as closely as possible farmers' behaviour. Limiting the drivers of the decision making process to the biophysical system implies that each action must be triggered at run time via a set of rules which can be based on the state of the system, on constraints of resources availability, and on the physical characteristics of the system. Furthermore, the implementation of the management simulation must account for a broad range of actions within each of the typologies of management.
Simulation of complex systems is increasingly being implemented using a modular, component based approach. Implementing the simulation of management in a component based system poses challenges in defining a framework which must be reusable and able to account for a variety of agricultural management technologies applied to different enterprises. Furthermore, the implementation of management must allow using different approaches to model its impact on different model components.
AgroManagement is a software component to implement management events in a simulation model. It formalizes the decision making process via models called rules, and it formalizes the drivers of the implementation of the impact on the biophysical system via set of parameters encapsulated in data-types called impacts. The component can be extended without recompilation both as rules and as impacts. The information on the biophysical system is passed via a data-type called states; states also can be extended. The component implements the test of pre-conditions and post-conditions for each of the models provided, allowing an output on screen, TXT or XML file; custom output drivers can also be developed. Finally, the component can save management events occurred during a simulation, saving information via a writer (TXT and XML available); writers can be extended by developing custom writers. The component can be used in code developed using any Windows .NET language (VB, C#, C++ managed, J#). Sample applications are provided, as well as an HTML-style help and code documentation. A limited number of rules and impacts is currently implemented to allow testing the component, with the aim of validating software design.