Sustainability of research software AgriPoliS

在过去十年中，农业结构变化已成为农业政策辩论中日益重要的问题。这一方面是由于技术和体制的重大变化以及公众对现代农业的日益关注。另一方面，这些辩论是由于结构改革进程的复杂性，包括大量的权衡而引起的。为了研究具有特定社会、经济、环境和生态约束和影响的农业区域中农场结构变化的动态和紧急现象，申请人及其同事开发了研究软件AgriPolis。AgriPolis已经为DFG、欧盟和其他国家研究基金会资助的许多研究项目做出了贡献。AgriPolis的相关性和可用性也反映在其他几个基于代理的建模方法，以结构变化的农业部门，这是灵感来自AgriPolis的想法，或只是这个模型的变化与额外的简化或某些扩展。为了接触更多的潜在用户，方便其使用，提高其可靠性，规范其引用，提高模型结果的可访问性，并实现研究结果的高度可重复性，申请人及其团队旨在为AgriPolis开发信息基础设施。设想的信息基础设施提供高可用性信息和工具，通过整合储存库托管服务提供商Zenodo和GitHub的服务，促进AgriPolis的可用性。GitHub允许来自研究社区的大量感兴趣的用户以版本控制的方式联合开发AgriPolis，因此将大大提高和保持软件质量。指定版本号的软件和与AgriPolis适应研究区域有关的大量数据（输入、输出、数据分析、出版物等）将由Zenodo主办。这个程序允许数字对象标识符（DOI），这是必不可少的，以满足引用标准，并确保再现性。此外，这样的平台允许用户和贡献者轻松分享想法和经验。除了信息基础设施之外，还有其他目标，这是因为在过去20年中，不同的研究人员开发了AgriPolis，他们具有不同的编程技能和研究目标。因此，拟议的项目旨在将以前的研究成果统一到一个新的标准模型，包括扩展库。这一新标准将纳入C++编程语言发展带来的新机遇，而AgriPolis就是在C++编程语言中实现的。因此，新的农业政策标准和信息平台将提高质量、可用性和可扩展性。

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.