Note: Schedule has been revised. See Addendum to the Ninth Work Plan

Collaborating Institution
Oregon State University

John Bolte

Cooperating Institutions
University of Michigan

Jim Diana

Central Luzon State University, Philippines

Remedios Bolivar

Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Johan Verreth

Oregon State University

Marion McNamara

University of Georgia

Shree Nath

Objectives

1) To enhance the POND^© decision support system’s ability to conduct economic analyses for commercial aquaculture facilities.
2) To modify and calibrate POND^©s bioenergetic models to allow the simulation of growth, development, mortality, and yield of shrimp species in culture ponds.
3) To incorporate feed optimization capabilities into POND^©.
4) To develop training and education materials to support and enhance the use of POND^© in extension and academic settings.
5) To improve the user interface of POND^© to support analyses of common facility management tasks.

Significance
The POND^© software (Bolte et al., 1995; Nath et al., 1997; Nath, 1996) is a robust and powerful decision support tool developed by the Pond Dynamics/Aquaculture Collaborative Research Support Program (PD/A CRSP) to assist in the analyses of fish growth and pond dynamics in warmwater culture situations. POND^©incorporates a multilevel bioenergetic model of culture organism growth and development that has been successfully calibrated for a number of fish species (Nath, 1996), as well as a simple enterprise budgeter capable of basic cost/income accounting. POND^© provides estimates of feed and fertilizer requirements to satisfy growth requirements, or alternately allows simulating the effect of specific feed and/or fertilizer regimes on fish production and water quality. Further, POND^© allows for very flexible water budget estimation and can simulate water temperature profiles based on local climatic conditions and pond physical characteristics. The various submodels in POND^© have been widely validated and tested, and have generally produced good prediction of pond and facility dynamics over a wide range of facility configurations and geographic conditions.

The POND^© software has been available to end users via the World Wide Web for the past eighteen months. In that period of time, over 900 users have downloaded the software. As the user base of POND^© has grown, the need for a number of modifications and enhancements to the current POND^© capabilities has become apparent. The work proposed here seeks to incorporate user feedback to make POND^© more useful for addressing demand for enhanced economic analyses of pond facilities, optimized feed scheduling, using POND^© in a classroom environment, calibrating POND^© for shrimp species, and improving POND^© user interface.

The primary significance of the proposed work is in enhancing POND^© utility as a tool for more effectively managing commercial production facilities. The models incorporated into POND^© have demonstrated themselves to be useful tools for synthesizing the results of the PD/A CRSPs and others’ experimental results into a framework capturing the many interactions and interrelationships present in aquacultural production systems. The primary need for additional work now is to bring the previous efforts on developing core models of fundamental facility processes to bear on applied management.

The proposed study falls primarily within the area of Social and Economic Aspects identified in the PD/A CRSP Continuation Plan 1996-2001. Specifically, the work is relevant to the Decision Support Systems research theme, and should result in improved software tools for commercial aquaculture producers to plan and manage their facilities, and for instructors involved in academic aquaculture programs.

Anticipated Benefits
The proposed study is expected to result in the following benefits:

1) Enhanced ability to perform sophisticated economic analyses of production facilities.
2) Enable the analysis and management of pond-based shrimp culture facilities.
3) Development of feed optimization strategies for pond management.
4) Improved student understanding of pond dynamics and production management principles.
5) Enhanced capability to utilize POND^© in applied pond management and facility planning.

Research Design
Feedback from POND^© users has revealed several strong trends in user requirements for future development of POND^©. The feedback has come from the comments from the POND^© user base and serves as the driving factor for the work proposed here.

First and foremost, a requirement for doing more sophisticated economic analyses with POND^© has been cited by approximately one-half of those providing feedback. The current POND^© implementation is limited to simple enterprise budgeting, with the ability to incorporate simulation results that only reflect fish production. No feed, fertilizer or other resource costs resulting from the simulation are utilized directly in the enterprise budget; these items have to be explicitly entered, and are not synchronized with the facility simulation results. Further, the ability to associate time frames with cost/income items, or to schedule costs or harvest income is not currently supported. The analysis options associated with the resulting enterprise budget are limited, showing only a basic net income, rather than more sophisticated and useful measures of economic performance such as return on investment (ROI), marginal cost vs. return and partial budgets, etc. Because of the high demand for more sophisticated economic analyses in POND^©, we propose to address the deficiencies described with a more robust economic analysis package providing time-based and scheduled costs, tighter integration with facility simulations, and a wider range of reporting statistics.

A second area generating a high level of requests for enhancement of POND^© involves the inclusion of models of shrimp species growth and development. Because the current bioenergetic model in POND^© is fairly mechanistic and relatively species-independent, we have some expectation that we will be able to develop calibration parameters that provide good predictive capabilities of production dynamics. However, because of fundamental differences between the developmental cycles of shrimp and most cultured fish species, some modification to the basic bioenergetic model may be required, particularly to adequately estimate development during the early postlarval stages. We propose to calibrate and enhance the bioenergetic model to allow POND^©-based analyses of shrimp culture facilities.

As high-intensity fed systems become more important in commercial aquaculture, the ability to account for the effects of feed quality on production and to optimize feed utilization and expense becomes important. Feed input is frequently the highest variable cost associated with production. The bioenergetic model in POND^© is well-suited to account for feed quality and quantity effects of production dynamics, and POND^© currently includes these effects. We propose to refine the consideration of feed quality and expand the current linear programming-based fertilizer optimizer to encompass feed optimizations as well. Both formulation and optimizing feed quantity scheduling through the production will be incorporated into POND^© . This will greatly enhance the utility of POND^© for examining feed-driven production facilities from both biological and economic perspectives.

A fourth area for which the POND^© user community has expressed a high degree of interest is the use of POND^© in a classroom environment. Because POND^© synthesizes many aspects of pond dynamics and facility management, it has the potential to be used in a classroom setting to allow students to gain an understanding of the interrelationships between various aspects of management, production, and water quality through what-if scenario development. POND^© has been tested in an aquaculture management course at the University of Michigan (J. Diana, personal conversation) with mixed results. The main difficulties expressed by students using the software dealt with complexity of the interface and the lack of tutorials relating the use of POND^© to address specific management questions. We propose in this workplan to work with four listed cooperators to:

1) Develop enhanced user interfaces for assisting students and producers to use POND^© to address common, specific management tasks;
2) Develop instructional materials to use in conjunction with POND^© to enhance its utility as an educational vehicle; and
3) Evaluate the effectiveness of these enhancements for developing student understanding of pond dynamics.

Finally, we have recently explored the use of “wizards” to facilitate common tasks in POND^© (Nath and Bolte, 1998). The wizard approach has shown substantial potential to simplify the user interface and move POND^© from an analysis tool primarily for research to a more practical tool for applied commercial pond management and facility planning. We propose to further develop this concept and focus effort on interface improvements to make the POND^© models more accessible for applied users, and more focused on solving coming management tasks.

Specific research activities will therefore focus on the following:
1) Enhanced Economic Analyses and Enterprise Budgeting: POND^© currently contains a software “economist” that is capable of basic enterprise budgeting. This economist will be expanded in its ability to associate time periods with its various cost and income items, and to allow scheduling of costs to reflect seasonal or production cycle-related activities. This will allow the economist to track the dynamics of profitability and allow the determination of optimal harvest scheduling based on marginal cost/marginal return analyses. Additional economic indicators, including ROI, NPV, etc., will be incorporated into the economist. Partial budgets will similarly be supported. The enterprise budget reports will be modified to be consistent with the other PD/A CRSP enterprise budgeting activities. The economist user interface will be simplified and improved through the development of two additional wizards, to guide the user in defining production costs, and to facilitate enterprise budget analysis.
2) Calibration of POND^© Bioenergetic Model for Shrimp Species: We will attempt to calibrate the bioenergetic model using existing shrimp growth datasets using POND^© automatic calibration facilities. These datasets will be extracted from the PD/A CRSP Database and additional data sources. If modifications to the bioenergetic model are needed, these will be made based on other shrimp growth models (e.g., Leung and Shang, 1989).
3) Incorporating Feed Optimization into POND^©: POND^© currently contains a general-purpose linear programming (LP) optimizer applicable to any numerical optimization problem involving linear constraints. We currently use this optimizer to develop optimal (least-cost) fertilizer formulations to meet specific overall fertilizer demands. This optimizer will be adapted to perform similar functionality for feed formulation. Additionally, POND^© contains a genetic algorithm-based nonlinear combinatorial optimizer currently used for parameter estimation. This optimizer will be adapted for use in generating optimal feed schedules to meet production weight targets for particular harvest schedules, based on minimizing overall feed costs.
4) Training and Educational Material Development: A series of modules addressing the use of POND^© in applied planning and management will be developed in conjunction with the listed cooperators. The specific coverage of the modules will be determined in consultation with the cooperators, but is expected to be 1) basic familiarity with the use of POND^©, 2) facility capacity planning and production analysis, 3) production optimization, 4) fertilization rate determination, 5) feed rate determination, 6) water budgeting, 7) basic economic analyses, and 8) advanced economic analysis. We will monitor the use of these modules in a classroom setting and survey students as to the effectiveness of the tutorials in improving their understanding of aquaculture management.
5) Improving the POND^© User Interface: Many of the tasks listed above will require improvements in the POND^© user interface. We will replace most task-oriented components of POND^© with intelligent “wizards” capable of walking users through a specific task, explaining options associated with each task, and assisting in interpreting the results. Other incremental improvements taking advantage of advances in the underlying Win 95/NT operating system will be incorporated in POND^© as well.

Regional Integration
Modifications to the POND^© software should be of benefit to users in all the CRSP sites. In terms of the level of effort among the four CRSP regions, it is anticipated that the study will be distributed evenly.

Schedule

Report Submission
Quarterly progress reports and an annual report will be submitted consistent with the PD/A CRSP timelines for report submission.

References
Bolte, J.P., S.S. Nath, and D.H. Ernst, 1995. POND^©: A decision support system for pond aquaculture.
In: H. Egna, J. Bowman, B. Goetze, and N. Weidner (Editors), Twelfth Annual Technical Report. Pond Dynamics/Aquaculture CRSP, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, pp. 48-67.
Leung, P. and Y.C. Shang, 1989. Modeling prawn production management system: A dynamic Markov decision approach. Agricultural Systems, 29:5-20.
Nath, S.S., 1996. Development of a decision support system for pond aquaculture. Ph.D. dissertation, Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University, 273 pp.
Nath, S.S. and J.P. Bolte, 1998. Advances in the POND^© software: Wizard development and model refinements. In: D. Burke, J. Baker, B. Goetze, D. Clair, and H. Egna (Editors), Fifteenth Annual Technical Report, Pond Dynamics/Aquaculture CRSP, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR,
pp. 44-54.