António Pereira

The main objective of the DITTY (Development of an Information Technology Tool for the Management of European Southern Lagoons under the influence of river-basin runoff) project, financed by the European Union, is the development of information technology tools for the management of southern European lagunary systems. In Portugal, the ecosystem under study is Ria Formosa (Algarve). The objective of this paper is to discuss the importance of the project and to present the work developed in CEMAS within its scope.

The simplest computational approach for estimating environmental carrying capacity (CC) for bivalve suspension-feeders is to compare the combined rate of filtration with rates of processes that contribute to food renewal. More realistic approaches are based on mathematical models that take into account complex sets of feedbacks, both positive and negative, whereby cultured organisms interact with ecosystem processes. Each of these methods requires spatial and temporal integrations.

Resumo: This report presents the Decision Support System (DSS) applied to the Ria Formosa lagoon using an agent-based simulation approach. The idea is to include the interests of the decision-makers and stakeholders in the ecological system simulation; these entities are modelled as intelligent agents that communicate with the simulation tool (EcoDynamo) building one multi-agent community system.

Ria Formosa is a natural park managed partly by the Portuguese end-users of the DITTY project–Ria Formosa Natural Park authority, under “Instituto para a Conservação da Natureza (ICN)”. There are many conflicting interests over the management of this important coastal area: fishing, tourism, aquaculture, salt production, harbour activities, urban development and conservation.

Abstract 1-Ria Formosa is a large (ca 100 km 2) mesotidal lagoon system included in a Natural Park, with large intertidal areas and several uses such as fisheries, aquaculture, tourism and nature conservation. Its watersheds cover an area of approximately 864 km2, with a hydrographic network of small and, mostly, ephemeral rivers.

Abstract—Disruption management is one of the newest research paths in scheduling problems due to the growing service quality demanded in the transportation field. This paper presents an approach for the rescheduling of crews using an Ant Colony algorithm for costs optimization. The main goal is to find an optimized recovery solution after the occurrence of unexpected events that make the original assignment non-feasible.

Over the last few decades, several modelling tools have been developed for the simulation of hydrodynamic and biogeochemical processes in aquatic ecosystems. Until late 70's, coupling hydrodynamic models to biogeochemical models was not common and today, problems linked to the different scales of interest remain. The time scale of hydrodynamic phenomena in coastal zone (minutes to hours) is much lower than that of biogeochemistry (few days).

Summary In this work a biogeochemical model of Ria Formosa (South of Portugal) is presented. Ria Formosa is a large (ca 100 km 2) mesotidal lagunary system with large intertidal areas and several conflicting uses, such as fisheries, aquaculture, tourism and nature conservation. This coastal ecosystem is a natural park where several management plans and administrative responsibilities overlap.

Abstract This report presents the Decision Support System (DSS) applied to the Ria Formosa lagoon using an agent-based simulation approach. The idea is to include the interests of the decision-makers and stakeholders in the ecological system simulation; these entities are modelled as intelligent agents that communicate with the simulation tool (EcoDynamo) building one multi-agent community system.

Abstract Ria Formosa is a large (ca 100 km 2) mesotidal lagoon system with large intertidal areas and several conflicting uses, such as fisheries, aquaculture, tourism and nature conservation. Its watersheds cover an area of approximately 864 km 2, with a perimeter of 166 km and a maximum altitude of 522 m. There are about 100 different land use classes being divided among six major groups:(1) urban,(2) agricultural,(3) forest,(4) rangeland and pastures,(5) wetlands and (6) water bodies.

In this work a hydrodynamic model of Ria Formosa (South of Portugal) is presented. Ria Formosa is a large (ca 100 km2) mesotidal lagunary system with large intertidal areas and several conflicting uses, such as fisheries, aquaculture, tourism and nature conservation. This coastal ecosystem is a natural park where several management plans and administrative responsibilities overlap.

The usage of data mining models has the main purpose of discovering new patterns from dataset analysis by extracting knowledge from data and converting it to information. The most challenging part of problem solving is not the generation of high number of instances in dataset, most often hard to understand, but the interpretation of all those instances to extrapolate information about it.

The simulation of physical, chemical and biological processes in coastal ecosystems is used as a way to understand the system internal dynamics and to predict its evolution over time, in order to promote behaviours environmentally friendly and to induce effective and efficient management of the ecosystem as a whole.
The complexity and diversity of those processes encompass wide areas of knowledge, involving many researchers and research teams for their mathematical modelling. Each research team adopts a given programming language to translate the model to a computer application, simulating the processes that they are specialists and are interested in, rarely thinking about
the possibility of its integration with other models developed by other research teams, that simulate complementary processes. These applications are normally self-contained and, when used in a management context, require a lot of extra work to export and import results from one application to another, in order to share the knowledge acquired and complement the simulation. Furthermore, they do not integrate any kind of human rationality embedded to help a decision making activity.
The work presented in this document explores the capacity for the realistic simulation of complex systems, working consistently, integrating results generated by processes simulated in distinct applications and placing the human reasoning in the middle of the decision making system. It presents a framework for modelling and simulating coastal ecosystems and an associated methodology for creating an Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS). Both
are based on object oriented programming (OOP) and, in the case of the EDSS, on Autonomous Intelligent Agents. The modelling software simulator (EcoDynamo) is written in C++ and
includes several object dynamic link libraries (DLLs) for the simulation of the different physical and biogeochemical processes. These libraries were designed to be linked with different model shells, possibly written in different programming languages, for the sake of portability and reusability. A high level communication language (ECOLANG) was developed to allow the communications between EcoDynamo and the agents and applications that belong to the system. ECOLANG was designed to describe ecological systems in terms of regional
characteristics, living agent’s perceptions and actions and is independent from any hardware or software platform. The framework (Ecological Simulation Network – EcoSimNet) was
developed to easily integrate and bring together the several pieces of the system – the simulator is the core of the framework and all the agents/applications communicate with it;
the agents have, also, the ability to communicate with each other and can define several scenarios for the simulation in order to optimize their own objectives. To improve the speed of
the simulation process, the infrastructure provides mechanisms to integrate several simulators, enabling the parallel simulation of different configuration scenarios to increase the simulation speed. The EDSS uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology (AHP) to integrate multiple qualitative and quantitative conflicting criteria. The user gives a structure with a pairwise comparison between criteria based on its importance, and a priority ranking of the pre-processed scenarios is achieved. To validate the portability of the DLLs, some objects
were integrated in the COHERENS simulator (written in Fortran), and some processes simulated by COHERENS were invoked by the EcoDynamo simulator.
To validate the EcoSimNet framework, the simulation system was used both to simulate the Sungo Bay model (People’s Republic of China) and Ria Formosa (Algarve, Portugal). The
simulation system was used to simulate several distinct ecosystem configurations in order to demonstrate its flexibility. The framework was also used to optimize different scenarios with bivalve farming areas, and the EDSS was used with different management scenarios in the Ria Formosa lagoon (Portugal). The experiments performed indicate that these tools may be widely used by people involved in the management of coastal areas to integrate environmental, economic and social issues in the decision process, without an in-depth knowledge of modelling methodologies.

Ecological modelling and simulation is a field with an increased interest by the research community in order to foresee the evolution of ecosystems. Due to the strategic importance of coastal ecosystems, the management of these areas can and should take advantage of simulation tools and knowledge existing in the universities and research institutes to justify policy decisions in order to achieve sustainable development of these important natural resources. This book describes, in part, a study conducted in Portugal, incorporating models of coastal ecosystems, simulation, intelligent agents and decision support tools on a single platform to facilitate the management and decision-making on coastal areas.