A Simulation-Based Analysis of Interdependent Populations in a Dynamic Ecological Environment

Abstract

With the ever increasing computational power of computers, simulation-based approaches have become a feasible testing technique that does not require investing valuable resources to create an actual prototype. Thus, design changes can be introduced and design errors can be fixed before it is too late, making simulation a cheaper, safer and often more acceptable from an ethical perspective approach. In our paper we summarize the results from the analysis with the help of a computational simulation of a simple, yet analytically intractable problem scenario from the field of ecology. Our main goal is to confirm that even with a seemingly simple agent-based model and simulation, one could obtain plausible results regarding a system's real life behavior. As a last point we propose a more efficient alternative for analysis, rather than the more expensive simulation.