North West Shelf Joint Environmental Management Study:Software Description - InVitro (2006)

The NWS-InVitro model is a spatially explicit agent-based biophysical simulation model with adaptive time-steps and asynchronous submodel execution. It has been developed as the basis of the NWS-JEMS management strategy evaluation study. The model simulates a range of human activity and principal features of the marine ecosystem in Australia's North West Shelf (NWS) region under a variety of management strategies. The results of the simulations are to be used to assess the relative efficacy and robustness of these strategies across a broad range of environmental and economic conditions. NWS-InVitro takes a wide range of environmental/ecosystem data and data concerning human activity as input. Data typically used to configure the ecosystem and its environment would include bathymetry, rainfall, current fields, contaminant fields, wind, and the distribution and abundance of organisms simulated as well as the usual biological parameters such as mortality and growth rates. Data relating to human activity may include control zones for vessel movement or fishing, historical catch, locations of artefacts (platforms, ports, pipelines, etc), and population time series for ports, though it is not limited to these data. Data which is characteristically produced in a simulation includes distribution and abundance of simulated species, catch/cpue history, vessel movement and conflicts, contamination effects, and a range of other data. There is a degree of randomness in some of the process models used to represent the behaviour of components of the simulation, so the output data will differ between runs. These output data sets are meant to be used as a part of large number of runs which encompasses the likely variability in the modelled systems. A typical suite of runs will run to over a half a TByte. See References for information regarding the specific configurations used with respect to parameterisation, input and output data.