From the 25th until the 27th of September I attended the International Workshop on Simulation for Energy, Sustainable Development and Environment, held in Athens, Greece as part of the 10th International Multidisciplinary Modeling and Simulation Multiconference. The aim of the Workshop was to bring together scientists and professionals that use and develop models to simulate more sustainable practices and products, based on the idea that simulation models represent a major opportunity to consider the complex nature of environmental and socio-ecological systems.
For this conference, I submitted a paper entitled “Developing a sustainability assessment tool for socio-environmental systems: a case study of systems simulation and participatory modelling” co-authored by academics at Charles Sturt University in Australia: Professor Terry Bossomaier and Dr. Roderick Duncan from the Centre for Research in Complex Systems; PhD Candidate Andrea Rawluk and Professor Max Finlayson from the Institute of Land, Water & Society and Dr. Jonathon Howard from the School of Environmental Sciences.
The aim of the paper was to present the development of a tool to assess sustainability and to give an example in which the use of Agent-Based Modelling can be used as a tool during the process. As an example, for this paper, we chose to model environmental-based tourism of the Winton Wetlands, in Victoria, Australia . We modelled the behaviour of tourists that visit a wetland based on their expectations of a trip in terms of quality of the environment and the level of infrastructure of the site. The model takes into account the complex relations that exist among the environment, society and economy using individual decisions of different agents of the model.
Sturt's Notebook 