The role of MAS as a decision support tool in a water-rights market

• Published in: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Advanced Agent Technology pp. 35 - 49
• Main Authors: Botti, Vicente, Garrido, Antonio, Giret, Adriana, Noriega, Pablo
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer-Verlag 02.05.2011
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: simulation tools; applications of multi-agent systems; decision support; electronic institutions
• ISBN: 9783642272158; 3642272150
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-27216-5_4

Water is an essential and scarce resource. This motivates the development of technologies to make water use more efficient. One such proposal has been to deploy institutional frameworks --referred to as water banks-- where water rights may be exchanged more freely and thus foster better water use. Needless to say that good water management is a complex endeavor and the decision to enable a water bank is but one of many actions that policy-makers may take. However, having a water bank is a specially useful device. Once a water bank is enabled, policy-makers may regulate how trading is made and by so doing, have a direct influence on demand and with that foster a "good" use of water. In this paper, we present a decision-support environment constructed around a water-rights market. It is designed so that policy-makers may explore the interplay between i) market regulations, ii) trader profiles and market composition, and iii) the aggregated outcomes of trading under those set conditions. Our environment is designed as a multi-agent system that implements market regulations and is enabled with tools to specify performance indicators, to spawn agent populations and allow humans as well as software agents to participate in simulations of virtual trading.