Modeling adaptive fishery activities facing fluctuating environments : an AI approach

Fishery exploitation systems are driven by environmental fluctuations, the communities'adaptability, and the dynamics of interaction between these two. Better understanding and monitoring of fishery systems therefore requires an integrated representation scheme. An object-oriented model is presented for that purpose. Each component of the fishery system is considered a sub-object of a "fishery-system" generic object. In the hierarchy, environments, markets, fish stocks, fish industries, and equipment, as well as fishing, trading, and consuming communities are identified. The different components can exchange information, fishes, currencies, or human actors. A submodel of the human actors' decision process formalizes the interactions between the different components of the represented system. An application of this sub-model to a Senegalese (West Africa) small-scale fishery is presented. Ten years of fishery activity with observed communities' appearances and collapses, simple biological resource and fish prices dynamics have been successfully simulated. This scale model of the fishery system provides a simulation tool whereby hypotheses can be tested and the consequences of a perturbation (e.g., resource of market fluctuation, management decision) evaluated on the whole system dynamics. (Résumé d'auteur)