Our Project
Our goal was to creat a model for the water cycle concerning Farmer Brown's fields. We are asked to balance two confliciting factors: Amount of field space and amount of parking space. The farmer wants to make the most money possible, and people can only visit his field and pay him if there is parking space. However, if there is no space, the people cannot visit. If there is too little crop space there will be less interest and no people will come to his farm. To find out how many parking spaces he should build we made a model in both NetLogo and Excel.
Both the Excel and NetLogo models have their strengths and weaknesses. The Netlogo model is very visual and clear to see, but is not as editable or predictible as the Excel model, which is very helpful but difficult to understand.
For this reason we think that both our models are useful but for different things. To give data showing what the farmer should do the Excel model is the best, but if the goal is to help someone understand how the system works than they might want to look at the NetLogo model.
If you want to see our models you can download the NetLogo model here and the Excel model here. You can download Netlogo free here.