Widening stakeholder involvement : exploiting interactive 3D visualisation and protocol buffers in geo-computing

Land use change has an impact on regional sustainability which can be assessed using social, economic and environmental indicators. Stakeholder engagement tools provide a platform that can demonstrate the possible future impacts land use change may have to better inform stakeholder groups of the impact of policy changes or plausible climatic variations. To date some engagement tools are difficult to use or understand and lack user interaction whilst other tools demonstrate model environments with a tightly coupled user interface, resulting in poor performance. The research and development described herein relates to the development and testing of a visualisation engine for rendering the output of an Agent Based Model (ABM) as a 3D Virtual Environment via a loosely-coupled data driven communications protocol called Protocol Buffers. The tool, named Rural Sustainability Visualisation Tool (R.S.V.T) is primarily aimed to enhance nonexpert knowledge and understanding of the effects of land use change, driven by farmer decision making, on the sustainability of a region. Communication protocols are evaluated and Protocol Buffers, a binarybased communications protocol is selected, based on speed of object serialization and data transfer, to pass message from the ABM to the 3D Virtual Environment. Early comparative testing of R.S.V.T and its 2D counterpart RepastS shows R.S.V.T and its loosely-coupled approach offers an increase in performance when rendering land use scenes. The flexibility of Protocol Buffer’s and MongoDB are also shown to have positive performance implications for storing and running of loosely-coupled model simulations. A