The Operating Model (OM) is the main component of the MSE framework. The OM is used to describe the characteristics of a fishery system and contains all the parameters required to simulate the population and fleet dynamics, the collection of data, and the application of a management procedure (e.g., implement a size regulation, effort control, spatial closure, or catch limit).
An OM is built from four separate objects, each containing a set of parameter values for different aspects of the simulation:
- Stock object - parameters describing the stock dynamics
- Fleet object - parameters describing the fishing fleet dynamics
- Obs object - parameters describing the observation processes
- Imp object - parameters describing the management implementation
These objects are described in more detail in their respective pages.
In addition to the information contained in the Stock, Fleet, Obs, and Imp objects, an OM object has 15 slots with additional operating model information (see Table below).
The contents of the first 6 slots and the last slots are self-explanatory. The next section describes the remaining slots for the OM object.
| Slot | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Name | Name of the operating model |
| 2 | Agency | Name of the agency responsible for the management of the fishery. Character string |
| 3 | Region | Name of the general geographic region of the fishery. Character string |
| 4 | Sponsor | Name of the organization who sponsored the OM. Character string |
| 5 | Latitude | Latitude (decimal degrees). Negative values represent the South of the Equator. Numeric. Single value |
| 6 | Longitude | Longitude (decimal degrees). Negative values represent the West of the Prime Meridian. Numeric. Single value |
| 7 | nsim | The number of simulations |
| 8 | proyears | The number of projected years |
| 9 | interval | The assessment interval - how often would you like to update the management system? |
| 10 | pstar | The percentile of the sample of the management recommendation for each method |
| 11 | maxF | Maximum instantaneous fishing mortality rate that may be simulated for any given age class |
| 12 | reps | Number of samples of the management recommendation for each method. Note that when this is set to 1, the mean value of the data inputs is used. |
| 13 | cpars | A list of custom parameters. Time series are a matrix nsim rows by nyears columns. Single parameters are a vector nsim long |
| 14 | seed | A random seed to ensure users can reproduce results exactly |
| 15 | Source | A reference to a website or article from which parameters were taken to define the operating model |