Practical Use of Components in Agro-Ecological Simulation

The use of components to construct simulation models has many advantages and the technique is being used by many authors. However, in agro-ecological simulation there are some practical problems relating to the occurrence of circular dependencies between components and to tightly linked components. The objective of this paper is to present practical solutions to these problems. Circular dependencies are addressed by the introduction of a specialized component. Likewise, the degree of linking between component models can in some cases be reduced by introducing a specialized component. The practical problems that have cropped up in our work were successfully addressed and re-use of our component models has become more intuitive