## Management Strategy Evaluation

Now that we have an operating model and a set of management procedures, we are ready to run our first management strategy evaluation.

The MSE is run with the runMSE function, which requires two arguments: a OM object (ourOM in this case) and a character vector with the names of the MPs that will be tested (ourMPs):

MSE <- runMSE(OM=ourOM, MPs=ourMPs)
## Checking MPs
## Loading operating model
## Optimizing for user-specified movement
## Optimizing for user-specified depletion in last historical year
## 1 simulations have final biomass that is not close to sampled depletion
## Re-sampling depletion, recruitment error, and fishing effort
## Calculating historical stock and fishing dynamics
## Calculating MSY reference points for each year
## Calculating B-low reference points
## Calculating reference yield - best fixed F strategy
## Simulating observed data
## Running forward projections
## 1 / 5 Running MSE for AvC
## ..................................................
## 2 / 5 Running MSE for BK
## ..................................................
## 3 / 5 Running MSE for CC1
## ..................................................
## 4 / 5 Running MSE for DCAC
## ..................................................
## 5 / 5 Running MSE for Islope1
## ..................................................

The runMSE function first runs the historical simulations (the spool-up period) and then runs the MSE for the specified MPs. Messages are printed in the console to show the progress.

The runMSE function returns an object of class MSE, an S4 object with all of the information from the MSE run.

For example, the slot SB_SBMSY is a 3-dimensional array with the spawning biomass ($\text{SB}$) relative to the spawning biomass corresponding to maximum sustainable yield ($\text{SB}_{\text{MSY}}$; see Reference Points for more details) for each simulation, MP, and projection year:

class(MSE@SB_SBMSY)
## [1] "array"
dim(MSE@SB_SBMSY)
## [1] 48  5 50

See the Running the MSE and the MSE object pages for more details.

In the next section we will examine the MSE results.