Simulator

The ecosystem submodel is an individual-based model of tiger abundance in India. The simulator also includes agent-based submodels of individual and group decision making by the following individuals and groups:

1. two identified tiger poachers;
2. two identified middlemen involved in buying, transporting, and selling tiger parts;
3. Chinese consumers of tiger parts; and
4. the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau within India's Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change (MoEFCC).

The Chinese consumer submodel along with the wildlife protection agency submodel are aggregated, i.e., they simulate group-level decisions rather than the decisions of unique individuals. On the other hand, individual-level submodels are built for each identified trafficker be they a poacher or a middleman. These latter, individual submodels are linked to the associated nodes of the investigation's social network model of all traffickers in their database.

All individual tiger poacher submodels share the same perceived causal structure across their cognitive variables as expressed in their respective .id files. Likewise, all middlemen share the same perceived causal structure across their own set of cognitive variables. Individuals differentiate via entries in their respective parameter files. This model architecture can potentially result in a large number of parameter files and consequently, large demands for computer memory. This approach, however, is computationally efficient because there is no need for complex conditional distributions in a family of individual submodels (poachers or middlemen) in order to index each individual in the family.

The files contained in invesinfiles.zip are as follows.

1. IntIDs file containing all submodel file names:
   inveskit.id
2. Submodel files of tiger poachers:
   ID input file -- tigerpoacher1.id, Hypothesis parameter values -- tigerpoacher1-hyp.par, Initial parameter values -- tigerpoacher1-ini.par
   tigerpoacher2.id, tigerpoacher2-hyp.par, tigerpoacher2-ini.par
3. Middlemen submodel files:
   middleman1.id, middleman1-hyp.par, middleman1-ini.par
   middleman2.id, middleman2-hyp.par, middleman2-ini.par
4. Chinese consumers of tiger parts submodel files:
   cconsumers.id, cconsumers-hyp.par, cconsumers-ini.par
5. MoEFCC Crime Control Bureau submodel files:
   wccbureau.id, wccbureau-hyp.par, wccbureau-ini.par
6. Indian tiger ecosystem submodel files:
   tigereco.id, tigereco-hyp.par, tigereco-ini.par
7. Data files:
   tiger.dat, invesobsacts.ahs, tigerdesrd.dat
8. MPEMP constraints file:
   invesmpempcnstrnts.dat