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The World Economic Forum 2023, recently held in Switzerland, was focused on the world's most pressing global challenges and the potential for advancing innovative solutions. In this blog post, we will shine a light on some of the most severe risks over the next decade and our abilities to tackle global issues for future resilience using simulation modeling.

Even though your business may not involve anything remotely related to farming or agriculture, we believe our modeling approach is useful for demonstrating how an interactive simulation model can be used to improve collaboration and decision making.

Let’s examine a model where we used high-level aggregate data and focused on the interactions between different processes. NB: No animals have been harmed during these simulations.

Sea lice, Lepeophtheirus salmonis (Krøyer), are a well-documented parasite of farmed salmonids; infestations can be costly as a result of chemical treatments to salmonids as well as loss of fish due to mortality and morbidity. Some medicinal treatments have been pursued by the salmon industry to control sea lice infestations on farms, but these methods are expensive, stressful to salmon, have detrimental environmental impacts, and can be hazardous to workers. A team from The University of Prince Edward Island, the Centre for Veterinary and Epidemiological Research, and the Atlantic Veterinary College developed an agent-based model to simulate the effects of cleaner fish on sea lice loads of farmed salmonids.

Grapevine leafroll disease (GLRD) threatens the economic sustainability of the grape and wine industry in the United States and around the world. This viral disease reduces yield, delays fruit ripening, and affects wine quality. Shady S. Atallah, Miguel I. Gomez,Jon M. Conrad, and Jan P. Nyrop from the University of New Hampshire published a Plant-level, Spatial, Bioeconomic Model of Plant Disease Difussion and Control: Grapevine Leafroll Disease in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. The project examines the impact of alternative disease control strategies on distributions of bioeconomic outcomes and ranks them based on the vineyard expected net present values (ENPVs). Using simulation modeling them to analyze alternative disease control strategies that would not be possible using classical approaches.