A Computational Agent Model of Flood Management Strategies

A geographically explicit flood simulation model was designed and implemented as a tool for policy making support, illustrated here with two simple flood management strategies pertaining to the Upper Tisza area in Hungary. The model integrates aspects of the geographical, hydrological, economical, land use, and social context. The perspectives of different stakeholders are represented as agents that make decisions on whether or not to buy flood insurance. We demonstrate that agent-based models can be important for policy issues in general, and for sustainable development policy issues in particular, by aiding stakeholder communication and learning, thereby increasing the chances of reaching robust decisions. The agent-based approach enables the highlighting and communication of distributional effects of policy changes at the micro-level, as illustrated by several graphical representations of outputs from the model