Resource Page: Research Project Details
Institution: The Department of Social Sciences, NijmegenUniversity, the Center for Environmental Research, Programme Environment and Development (project info) , and the CLUE project, Wageningen University (project info)
Description: The MameLuke framework is developed to enhance the understanding of the linkages between societal processes and land use and -cover changes by modelling individual decision making processes, group decisional processes and human-environment interactions. The MameLuke framework uses (multi-) agent based modelling, following and extending the RePast 2.0 features, as its primary technique to represent and simulate the individual decisions and societal processes regarding land use. The decision-making process of an actor is a theoretical extension of the Action-In-Context framework. The actors’ decisional processes vary due to the actors’ roles indicating the actors’ social groups and the actors’ characteristics, also, they differ due to changes in the land cover (interpreted by the actor). During each (discrete) time-step in a model, the social actor determines its decisional course based upon its own state, needs, desires, preferences, beliefs and experience.
Every time step the actor has to manoeuvre through a landscape of decisional paths, choosing the paths that have outcomes closest to the desires and preferences of the type of actor. Each decisional path consists of at least one decisional node and contains a user defined nodal sequence. Each decisional node is a transaction interface between an initialising agent and a recipient agent. In a decisional node or transaction, the agents exchange ‘capital’.
In the first application, the model simulates various settlement decisions of (migrant-)households in San Mariano, the Philippines during the 20th century. This research-area, bordered by the tropical rainforest in the Northern Sierra Madre mountains, is populated by people with many ethnic backgrounds with several different (semi-) traditional land use habits. The model is based upon collected life-histories, GIS maps and qualitative interviews on individual decisional processes combined with aggregated and individual level statistical data.
The model analyses the relevance of various settlement-decisions of actors with their own social and ethnical behavioural decision processes while interpreting their social and physical environment. More>>
Software Used: JAVA - Repast 2.0
(MS Access 2000 and MS SQL-server)
Contact: Marco Huigen