Qualitative Modeling and Simulation of a Coupled Bioeconomic System

The understanding and management of marine processes and resources is of great economic and social importance. Marine resources have been greatly exploited, which has led to a thriving but unadopted fishery infrastructure and brought about a number of negative environmental impacts. However, the main reason for the non-prosperous rationing of marine resources is the lack of knowledge about certain processes as well as the non-availability of adequate steering instruments. This paper addresses the lack of conceptualization and proposes a qualitative dynamical model approach for an improved decision support under the premise of vague knowledge. This approach makes it necessary to reduce and classify the large solution set supplied by a qualitative differential equation. The derivation of a focus graph, which displays the behavior of variables of interest, allows to extend previous approaches in bioeconomic modeling fundamentally and also illustrates the general impacts of an overcapitalization of fleets on a renewable marine resource.