Sustainability of research software AgriPoliS

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Farm structural change has become over the past decade an increasingly important issue in debates on agricultural policy. This is on the one hand due to substantial technological and institutional changes as well as increasing public concerns about modern agriculture. On the other hand, these debates are fostered through the complexity of the process of structural change including substantial trade-offs. In order to investigate the dynamics and the emergent phenomena of farm structural change in agricultural regions with specific social, economic, environmental and ecological constraints and implications, the applicant and his colleagues have developed the research software AgriPoliS. AgriPoliS has already contributed to many research projects funded by DFG, EU and research foundations from other countries. The relevance and usability of AgriPoliS is reflected also by several other agent-based modelling approaches to structural changes in the agricultural sector which are inspired by ideas from AgriPoliS or which are just variations of this model with extra simplifications or certain extensions. In order to reach more potential users, to facilitate its usage, to improve its reliability, to standardize its citation, to improve the accessibility of model results, and to achieve a high reproducibility of research results, the applicant and his team aim to develop an information infrastructure for AgriPoliS. The envisaged information infrastructure provides with high availability information and tools facilitating the usability of AgriPoliS through integrating the services from the repository hosting providers Zenodo and GitHub. GitHub allows AgriPoliS to be developed jointly by a larger number of interested users from the research community in a version controlled manner and therefore will greatly improve and retain the software quality. The software with assigned version number and the substantial data related to the adaptation of AgriPoliS to study regions (input, output, data analysis, publications, etc.) will be hosted by Zenodo. This procedure allows for digital object identifiers (DOI), which are essential to meet citation standards and to ensure reproducibility. Moreover, such a platform allows users and contributors to easily share ideas and experiences. Further objectives in addition to the information infrastructure result from the fact that AgriPoliS has been developed during the past 20 years by different researchers with different programming skills and research objectives. Therefore, the proposed project aims at unifying the previous research outcomes towards a new standard model including libraries for extensions. This new standard will incorporate new opportunities resulting from the evolution of the programming language C++, in which AgriPoliS is implemented. As a result, the new standard of AgriPoliS and the information platforms will improve quality, usability and extensibility.