D5.7 Policy Environment module
Creators: name: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
name: Idener AI
name: Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology
name: Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias de Andalucía
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: AGRICORE H2020

description: AGRICORE is a research project funded by the European Commission under the RUR-04-2018 call, part of the H2020 programme, which proposes an innovative way to apply agent-based modelling to improve the capacity of policymakers to evaluate the impact of agricultural-related measurements under and outside the framework of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).This deliverable presents the results of Task 5.7 - Policy Environment Module, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH). The objective of task 5.7 is to design a module capable of incorporating those policies of interest for the policymaker or the agro-economic researcher into the AGRICORE simulation environment. Agricultural policies are articulated through measures and instruments to which farms can adhere (on a compulsory or voluntary basis). Since in AGRICORE each farm is represented by an agent, these measures and instruments are incorporated into the simulation by modifying the optimisation problem that each agent resolves to determine its future actions. That is, a given instrument is included:(i) by incorporating an additional additive term to the objective function (usually linked to a binary decision variable that determines the agent's adherence to that scheme/instrument).(ii) modifying the constraints affecting the resolution of the objective function (by adding new constraints or varying their limit values).Given the wide diversity of policy mechanisms that make up pillars I and II of the CAP, as well as the regulatory freedom that the Commission gives to member states (MS) to implement them through specific instruments, the first sub-objective of this task has been to identify all the elements that completely describe one policy. To this end, a domain diagram has been constructed using the Unified Modelling Language (UML), which contemplates the whole context of public policy definition (in principle agricultural policies, but could be extended to other types), including its main elements (requirements, commitments, indicators, verification mechanisms, etc.).The second step was to implement this diagram in the form of a fillable template to describe each policy, including its elements and their numerical values. To create such a template in a standardised way, a tagged language (eXtensible Markup Language - XML) has been used. To test the functionality of this template, several policies belonging to both Pillar I and Pillar II and related to the three AGRICORE use cases have been described.The last step is to build a mechanism to read these templates and translate them into concrete modifications of the optimisation problem encoded in the agents. At the moment, this is done using simple scripts in which the numerical values of the different policies are hardcoded and that, once executed, replace the preloaded generic objective function of the agents with the new objective function already incorporating the policy to be analysed.In the future, these scripts could be able to read the values automatically from the XML templates and modify the target function, even allowing the incorporation of more than one policy concurrently.The implementation of task T5.7 is of course related to the modelling work package WP3. Moreover, it is also associated with work package WP4, since the AGRICORE graphical interface already contemplates a section for recording and editing policy descriptions within an agricultural public policy repository.