A component to simulate agricultural management

Quantifying the impact of agricultural management on production and system externalities is the goal of many agricultural modeling 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. This paper presents a conceptual framework and a reusable software component to implement agricultural management in simulation systems. The framework is based on "rules" and "impacts", and it is extensible for both. A generic proof of concept is presented, and an application in a ModCom project is also described.