ABE - the Agent Based management Engine for iLand

The ABE model provides a framework to dynamically simulate adaptive forest management in multi-agent landscapes under changing environmental conditions. While the Rammer, W., Seidl, R., 2015 paper desribes ABE scientifically, the following wiki-pages provide more detail on both the concepts and the technical implementation.

Building blocks of ABE

 

Agent and agent types

In ABE, all forest managers are represented by Agents. Agents are responsible for the management of a specific part of the landscape. Each Agent is of a certain Agent Type. An Agent Type corresponds to a manager archetype such as “farmer” or “forest company”, while an Agent represents an individual manager with specific properties, e.g., the agents’ age.

Stand treatment programs

A stand treatment program consists basically of a collection of activity objects, which typically cover the silvicultural treatments to regenerate, tend and thin, and harvest a stand. In addition, the STP includes a definition of a time window for each activity, from which ABE autonomously derives the sequence and preliminary time of execution for each activity.

Management activities

Activities are the core element of forest management in ABE, as they are the elements that actually change the forest state in the ecosystem model by removing or planting trees.ABE provides a library of pre-defined activities that cover the most important aspects of forest management. Yet, the activity library can be easily extended by providing user-defined activities. Activities are fetched from the library by specifying the name of the activity type and by further defining the properties of the activity (Box 4).

Using ABE

 

• Spatial setup of ABE: documentation of the setup procedures
• Creating a "minimal" ABE: a guide for a minimal ABE
• ABE Outputs: the outputs of ABE
• ABE Interactive use and debugging: tipps and tricks for using ABE

 

Reference

• ABE Javascript API: Documentation of the JavaScript API