Re: advise please - control

[gross]

Regarding swarm and control, I am quite interested in spatial control 
problems (associated with environmental and epidemiological issues)
and have made a start on using swarm to investigate these. The underlying
problem concerns where and when to allow hunting, harvesting, fire 
suppression, vaccination, etc. in order to maximize some measure 
of public utility. Swarm offers a possible vehicle to link such 
problems to cases in which the underlying agents (humans, bears,
disease vectors, etc.) move around. 

As a first start on this, this summer Andrew Lovett wrote a swarm code 
(Java implementation for Windows) with me to investigate a limited range of 
potential spatial controls for a model of relatively simple population 
dynamics involving several agents. It has been posted to 
ftp://ftp.swarm.org/pub/swarm/src/users-contrib/anarchy
as Space2d.tar.gz
Marcus Daniels kindly pointed out that there are a few changes needed to 
get this working correctly on Unix - I have not done a version 
implementing these yet. This is of course not in the mode of standard 
manufacturing control problems, but perhaps it will give you some
idea of initial steps in optimization approaches. As I have time, 
I do intend to investigate dynamic optimization procedures (e.g. 
dynamic programming algorithms) associated with rules for agents.
This is a very active area of behavioral ecology, but is typically not 
carried out in an explicit spatial context. Unfortunately, the problems
are so combinatorially large that this likely means parallel
implementations are necessary.  

Cheers,
     Lou Gross
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    and Mathematics
Director, The Institute for Environmental Modeling
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
address@hidden
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/
http://atlss.org/ (ATLSS Project Home Page)
http://archives.math.utk.edu/mathbio/ (Math Archives for Life Sciences)
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/bioed/ (Quantitative Life Sciences Education)


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