Exploring agent architectures for farmer behavior in land-use change. A case study in coastal area of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Abstract

Farmers are the key actors of land-use change processes. It is thus essential to choose a suitable architecture for farmer behavior to model such processes. In this paper, we compared three models with different architectures to model the farmer behavior in the coastal areas of the Ben Tre province: (i) The first one is a probabilistic model that allows farmer to select the land-use pattern based on land change probability; (ii) The second model is based on multi-criteria decision making and takes into account the land suitability of the parcel and the farmer benefit; (iii) The third model used a BDI (Beliefs - Desires - Intentions) architecture. For each of these models, we have compared the difference between simulated data and real data by using the Fuzzy Kappa coefficient. The results show the suitability of the BDI architecture to build land-use change model and to support decision-making on land-use planning.