Restricting activities and resources

One way CLEM provides you with considerable flexibility in designing your simulation is to restrict the resources an activity applies to and when an activity happens. For example, rather than an activity feeding the entire herd, you can have that activity just feed the pregnant females between July and September. This is achieved by adding Filter, Timer and Limiter components to your tree structure. These components will apply to all activities in the folder they are placed in and all activities in subsequent sub folders. As mentioned there are three broad types:

Filters are designed to filter or limit a list of resources based on the rules set for the filter. This allows an activity to be applied to a subset of the available resource. At present filters are available for Labour and Ruminants. There are a number of different filter components that have the necessary associated parameters. Each of these is referred to as a FilterGroup as they contain any number of filter rules within them. These rules are additive in that all must be met for an individual to be included in the group. Filters are discussed in full in the Filtering and sorting individuals section and an example is provided where animal pricing is supplied.

Timers are used to determine when an activity can be performed. By default, activities will be performed every time-step (month), but a timer associated with an activity will apply a new set of rules. A range of timers are currently available for CLEM and these include, month range, date range, interval, based on pasture levels, based on the amount of a given resource, and based on crop harvest date. See Using timers.

In CLEM, activities are all independent in that they don't know what other activities are doing. This raises some issues when we need to apply a rule across a range of activities. One such scenario is when there is an upper limit on how much material can be cut and carried in a time-step across all activities. To achieve this you can add a Cut and Carry Limiter to the simulation tree structure and set the limits in the parameters. All activities that undertake cut and carry will obey this limit. Other limiters may be added in future as required. See Limiters.

 

 

See next section - How to...