Oil Spill Simulation

Description

This agent model simulates an oil spill that contaminates the water at different levels. Additionally, the oil spill cause marine animals to get sick due to to the water getting contaminates. These sick marine animals can then spread oil to healthy marine animals and make them sick. This is where marine response comes in and cleans the animals off.

Open Model

Required Software

To open these agent models, you will need to click on the link.

The link displays a page with three options: Play, Design, and Edit.

To start the model, press the "Design" button. To stop the model, press the back button.

How to use Model

In order to open up the model, you simply click on the "Design" button. Next, you hover your mouse over the gear icon on the top left corner and click on it. Then, click on "Show Simulation Properties" and you can drag the menu to one side.

To start the model, click on the icon to the right of the red square icon near the top of the page. That icon is called timestep. You can click the timestep icon to gradually see the progress of the model. You can also start the model by clicking on the green play button to see the model progress faster.

If you want to interact with the model, you can click on the pencil icon and then click on the agent or shape of your preference(except ocean water).Then click on one of the blue squares in order to add on to the model.

Screenshots

Observations

I have observed that in some instances sick marine life shapes are heavily spawned due to the amount of time it takes for the sorbent boom to clean up the oil spill. When there is a lot of sick marine life, they make the healthy marine life sick from the oil and so it takes even a longer time for the marine response to make everyone healthy again.

Analysis

What I have anaylzed from this agent model is that depending on how slow the sorbent boom cleans up the origin of the oil spill, there will be a lot of sick marine creatures. Because of the big quantity of the sick marine creatures, there is a slower chance of the healthy marine creatures becoming healthy again unless the user adds more marine response agents.

Even though this is not a completely accurate simulation of an oil spill, it gives a visual representation to the user of the spread of the oil. This model may be even turned into a game for the user to try to stop the oil spill and try to save all the marine life from oil contaminated water.