GSOE9510 - Summer 2025

The Fishery Challenge

(Team Project)

Summary

This project focuses on the learning objective of sustainability, but involves consideration of ethics, context and teamwork, too. You will work in a team of 10-12 students. Note that the groups formed for this game are independent of your workshop groups or sessions. Students from different workshop groups and sessions can also form a group together to play the fishing game against other teams.

PART 1 involves you playing a simulation game as part of a team. You will be playing against the other student teams. (Study the marking scheme (attached) and you will see that the winning team gets an extra mark!) The game is described below. It involves you accumulating ‘wealth ’ by ‘fishing’ from a common stock of fish.

For PART 2 you will write an individual short summary about what you have learnt from this whole project and describe how your team operated. The requirements for this report will be given once the game is over, as they will depend, in part, on what happens during the game.

Team membership: You must select your project team on Moodle. Course Syllabus Materials> Select A Project Team

Marks: You are reminded that this project will count as  15 % of your summative mark in this course and is a team mark. Additionally, you will reflect on your experience playing this game and creating the learning resource. This will count as 10 % of your summative mark in this course and is an individual mark.

Learning Objectives

With reference to the GSOE9510 learning objectives, this activity will help you learn about the following.

Organisations & leadership               Specifically, by considering the team in which you work

Engineering’s context                       There are many perspectives on a technology, besides the purely technical one.

Sustainability                                   This is the major focus

Identifying problems of ethics            Noting that the profession has nominated sustainability as an ‘ethical good’.

Over the next few weeks, we will build further on these ideas. You will be involved in many discussions with  the rest of the class. In  these discussions, the diversity of perspectives is important. In your professional practice, too, you will need to communicate with many parties who do not share your engineering view of a problem. You are well aware of how failure to consider the context of an engineering design often leads to a serious failure of the overall system. You will also need to examine messy problems, i.e. those with uncertainties and multiple conflicting aims, from several different perspectives.

Background

Sustainability does not have a simple explanation. In essence, it is about the future, specifically whether a system can persist into the future and, if so, in what form. Analysis of, and subsequent decisions about, sustainability often follows a computer-based simulation of a scenario playing out as away to predict the future. This project is based on such a simulation, examining a ‘fishing system. ’ It will involve ecological, economic and technological aspects, but not social. Note, too, that a simulation should match reality. Reality includes ambiguities and random events.

Malthus is famous for arguing that indefinite linear growth models are nonsensical in reality, but it was Verhulst who introduced the logistic equation to give mathematical form. to this observation. Lotka and Volterra independently studied the interaction of predators and prey by using nonlinearly coupled equations. The latter applied his work to a successful study of Mediterranean fisheries. Such coupling between different components (equations) in a system (model) means that the system maybe chaotic, depending on the precise values of the model’s parameters. Such a situation is not unusual in engineering. For example, the equations governing lasers show similar potential for such behavior. More generally, chaos is a consequence of systems having some form.  of feedback, which is a surprisingly ‘normal’ circumstance. However, the identification of domains of chaos is usually a very difficult mathematical challenge.

Chaos is a mathematical state; it means that we cannot have a deterministic knowledge of the future. Alas, this ‘inconvenient’ possibility is often neglected by those who use models. Remember, too, that any modelling is only as good as the assumptions being made, some of which depend on intrinsically imperfect measurements of reality.

PART 1 – ‘Playing the Game’

Your team is one of N competing in a game. Each round (Round n) of the game you must complete instructions and submit them to

The first set of instructions is due 6 pm Tue 11 January.

Goal

You will win the game if you have the highest value of assets at the end of play, assets being the total of your bank balance and there-sale value of your fishing units. Your team’s sources of wealth are fishing and bank interest which earnt by your monetary reserves.

Fishing units

Of course, catching fish is an ‘unnatural’ action for humans (unlike, say, pelicans or dolphins). To catch fish, you need to use ‘technology’ meaning, in this case, a fleet of fishing units. These can be bought (and sold) during the game.

Each round, your team gets paid for its fishing catch at the rate 10 CU/UoF, where UoF denotes Units of Fish and CU denotes Currency Units.

As your team gains more wealth, it can provide engineers with the resources needed to introduce new technologies, i.e. better ways to catch fish. First, they can make units mobile. Second, they can make them more ‘efficient’ (measured by UoF/fishing unit).

1.   A local-fisher can only fish in the fishing ground off the port where it was built. It cannot be relocated and it only fishes in the port which is assigned to the team. A mobile- or heavy-fisher can fish in any fishing ground.

2.   Haul is the factor used to calculate the catch. A heavy-fisher catches 5 times as much in terms of UoF, all else being equal.

3.   Fishing units have operating  expenses each round. Each unit incurs a baseline cost of 50 CU/round. The additional expense depends on whether the unit is off-shore or in-shore. For example, a local-fisher working in-shore costs 100 CU/round; a heavy-fisher off-shore costs

400 CU/round.

4.   A fishing unit can be scrapped (sold to recyclers). Scrap value is fixed, at 15 % of initial cost.

Ship-building

In any round, the engineers (ship-builders) can only accept total orders from all teams of 20% more than the total orders of the previous round. Engineers cannot expand their business at an infinite rate: new staff take time to train. Their activities will contract if no business is forthcoming: engineers will leave the industry. Obviously if there are no orders from anyone, the engineers go out of business!

To prevent their business  from being  exposed  to  any  particular team’s  financial  failure,  the shipbuilders limit the size of your team’s order. In any round, no team’s order can exceed one-third the ship-builders’ total capacity.

If total orders exceed the maximum ship-building capacity available, the excess will be deferred into the next round (or later). Each fishing unit is built at the same rate, which means cheaper units are finished first.

You are charged half the price of the ordered unit in the round when you order it; you are charged the second half in the round when it is completed. This maybe the same round, so be prepared to pay full price immediately. You cannot use it for fishing and it costs no operating costs until the round after delivery, i.e. when you can use it. You may cancel an unfinished unit, but you do not get the deposit refunded.

The fishing area

The fisheries consist of in-shore and off-shore fishing grounds, forming concentric circles as shown in Fig 1. The FOUR interior, off-shore grounds are denoted W, X, Y & Z. The 2N exterior, in-shore grounds are denoted by A, ab, B, bc, C, cd, etc. Every second in-shore sector has a port.

Fish stock surveys

If you want to know something about the population of fish, then you must spend money on research. Whenever one of your fishing units works in a particular fishing ground, you can pay for a fish-stock survey which will tell you the population of fish during that round of play in that specific fishing ground. Each in-shore fishing survey costs 10 CU and each off-shore survey costs 20 CU (because you need to pay for more travel-time by the fish researcher).

Financial considerations

All transactions are rounded to the nearest CU. Your team’s financial balance is calculated at the end of each round. If the balance is positive, interest at rate +r is added to your account. If the balance is negative (i.e., you are in debt), interest at rate R is debited from your account. In this game, in an era of low interest rates, r = 0.05 and R = 0.08.

A team’s maximum permissible debt (or overdraft) D is at least 450 CU. It increases when the fishing business is operating successfully, and at the end of Round n, it is calculated from the income from fishing in Round (n − 1).

D = R/value of catch − operating expenses CU

If its debt exceeds this permitted maximum, there must be a sale of your team’s assets, i.e. fishing units, at the start of the next round to get it within the limit. If a team’s balance cannot get within its permitted overdraft, then it is BANKRUPT.

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy is part of the ‘business cycle.’ If a team is bankrupt, then it misses the next two rounds of play (and doesn’t score the mark for avoiding bankruptcy). After sitting out these rounds, the team resumes play with 100 CU. Upon resumption, the team’s first decision is whether or not to order a new fishing unit.

‘In the beginning’

The game has the following initial conditions.

•   Your team has 1 local-fisher (unit xL01, with x ∈  {A,B,...} denoting your team) with a designated ‘home’ port, that differs for each team. (Recall that, when not in port, this fishing unit can only fish in this same space all game.)

•   Your team has 300 CU.

•   Your team’s permissible debt at the end of Round 1 is 450 CU.

•   The engineers can accept a total order from all teams for new fishing units of 225N CU in Round 1.

Apart from the geography of Fig 1, there is no other initial knowledge of the fishing grounds.

One round of gameplay

For each round, the information you need to provide is shown in the examples of Figure 2.

1.   Your team allocates each of its fishing units.

Each unit should be either kept in port or sent to a specific fishing ground as shown on the map in Fig 1. Remember a local-fisher can only be sent to the fishing ground off the port where it was built, i.e. where it starts.

Note that any unallocated unit will be assumed to be in port for the round. This incurs its baseline expense but catches no UoF.

2.   Your team may buy and/or sell fishing units.

Complete any forced sale needed to reduce your debt. Bought units can only fish in the round after they are delivered,i.e. you have finished paying for them. They are being built this round. Engineers work at a finite pace. Any deposit, though, is expenditure in the round a unit is ordered. You may scrap any unit in any round. Units sold will incur no operating costs in the round.

After ‘playing’ each round,you get the current state of the game.

The following public information will be available after each round. It will be posted in the public discussion by Baruwaluwu. An example is found in Figure 3.

•   total fishing units by type that were in each fishing ground

•   the total combined average catch of all fishing units for the round (Not yours, but for everyone combined.)

•   total capacity of the shipbuilder for the next round (You can order only up to 1/3 of that.)

Each individual team will receive the following information from Baruwaluwu. Since you might want to keep this confidential, it will be provided in your team’s private discussion thread on moodle. Examples are found in Figure 4.

•   the individual catch and operating costs for each of its fishing units

•   the average stock of fish in any fishing ground for which a survey was bought

•   the detailed statement for its account

•   its currently permitted maximum overdraft and any need for a forced sale

•   the state of its orders with the shipbuilders

NB: The numbers in the examples of Figs 2-4 may be impossible for the parameters (prices, interest rates, fish populations, etc) we use this year.

Round 1

For Round 1, there are very few decisions to make.

•   Do you fish? or leave your local-fisher (unit xL01) in port?

•   Do you survey the fish population?

•   Do you order another fishing unit?

Procedural matters

Each team must decide instructions by the due date for each round. These must be submitted in the link:https://forms.office.com/r/0ziw5dv3ya.

After the round is played, Baruwaluwu will reply with the outcomes for that round. Instructions for each round are due according to the table below, unless a subsequent message indicates that an extension is granted. Common information will be posted in the project’s common space in Moodle.

The ‘missing’ times allow you extra time as a contingency for the preparation of the learning resource and also the in-class test. We plan to use the result of the game during the final tutorial activity in Week 5.

This is a competitive game that exercises your communication skills and co-operation. It requires you to work with your team-mates. Study the marking scheme attached. You are not explicitly asked to exercise negotiation skills (though that probably will happen as it is intrinsic to working in any team).

The following is the way that PART 1 of this project—‘playing the game’—will be marked (out of 8).