ForestSim is an agent-based model (ABM) that is intended for research into the policy and sustainability of woody-biomass based biofuels and bioenergy options. It is intended to be an advanced model that incorporates the following aspects of the socio-environmental system:
- Forest growth model
- Non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners
- Logging companies
- Biorefinery and bioenergy plants
ForestSim is primarily a Java application that makes use of the MASON Multiagent Simulation Toolkit to manage to simulation and GeoMASON to support GIS data. The initial 1.0.1 release has been peer-reviewed and published in SoftwareX, please cite as,
Zupko, R., & Rouleau, M. (2019). ForestSim: Spatially explicit agent-based modeling of non-industrial forest owner policies. SoftwareX, 9, 117–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2019.01.008
The following is the orginal development environment:
- Eclipse IDE Neon Release (4.6.0 or 4.6.1)
- Java SE SDK 7 (JavaSE-1.7)
A number of JAR files are included in the repository that are dependencies of MASON and GeoMASON, additional project libraries not included are managed using the MAVEN POM file.
Additionally, the following Eclipse plug-ins are recommended for developers:
- ObjectAid UML Explorer for Eclipse (1.1.11)
Two pom files are provided for building ForestSim:
pom.xml builds the core library and produces one output with all dependencies and one without. In Eclipse suggested goals for Maven Build are clean package
pom-examples.xml is an alternative POM that builds the examples as part of the JAR. In Eclipse it can be run using the Maven Build configuration -f pom-examples.xml clean package
Currently only one example model is included in the repository and detailed directions for running it can be found under documentation/Getting Started.md All of the code required to run the example is present in the /examples directory and /run contains example code for running the model from the command line.
master is the primary stable branch for ForestSim. Development by the author(s) will generally take place on feature branches or development as a general development branch. Contributors are encouraged to fork the repository and submit pull requests with stable code.
Version numbers for ForestSim will have the following structure:
[Major].[Minor].[Revision]
Where [Master] should be understood to be major changes that may break models dependent upon ForestSim. [Minor] contains significant changes to the API, but retains backwards compatibility with method signatures. [Revision]s are smaller updates that are primary focused on bug fixes or quality-of-life issues (ex., adding to an enumerated list).
Wenger, K. F. (Ed.). (1984). Forestry Handbook (Second Edition). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.