Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Agricultural Economics / Jason S. Bergtold / Tian Xia / Brazil is one of the leading producers of ethanol, sugar, and sugarcane. Increasing demand for biofuels aligned with public policies prompted the expansion of sugarcane into the Brazilian Cerrado, particularly, into the states of Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. The overall purpose of this dissertation, comprised of three essays, is to understand the impacts from the sugarcane expansion on farmers, processors, and the market. At the market level, the first essay, estimates the impacts of public policies and market factors on ethanol and sugar, supply and demand, in Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul, using three-stage least squares. Results show that ethanol supply is sensitive to public policies whereas the sugar supply is sensitive to market prices. Sugar and ethanol were found to be complementary outputs. For ethanol expansion to be sustainable the ethanol market must be developed to the extent that it relies on market factors and is no longer dependent on public policies. At the farmer level, the second essay, examines farmers' willingness to sign a sugarcane contract with a mill in the Brazilian Cerrado. A hypothetical stated choice experiment was conducted with farmers in Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. Respondents choose between three contracts (land rental, agricultural partnership and supply) and two optout options ("keep current contract" or "not grow sugarcane"). A single and a two opt-out random parameters models were estimated. The two opt-out model allowed for a better interpretation of the status quo. Willingness to pay, direct and cross-elasticity measures for contract attributes were calculated. Results showed that farmers prefer contracts with higher returns, shorter duration and a lower probability of late payments. Farmers seemed to prefer to renting out their land to the mill than to produce sugarcane themselves, which could lead to consequences for rural development and the sustainability of sugarcane expansion. At the processor level, the third essay investigates the impact of vertical coordination on input-oriented technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis (first stage) and a Tobit censored model (second stage). 204 Brazilian mills were considered. The second stage controlled for vertical integration as well as other characteristics of the mill. Vertical integration was measured as the percentage of total sugarcane used, supplied by mills. A negative, though minimal, relationship between vertical integration and technical efficiency was found. Hence, technical efficiency is not the major driver of vertical integration. Other vertical coordination strategies may bring more benefits in terms of technical efficiency (e.g. contracts). Drivers of vertical integration seem to vary according to the characteristics of the location of the mill.

Many biological systems are known to accomplish complex tasks in a decentralized, robust, and scalable manner - characteristics that are desirable to the coordination of engineered systems as well. Inspired by nature, we produce coordination strategies for a network of heterogenous agents and in particular, we focus on intelligent collective systems. Bottlenose dolphins and African lions are examples of intelligent collective systems since they exhibit sophisticated social behaviors and effortlessly transition between functionalities. Through preferred associations, specialized roles, and self-organization, these systems forage prey, form alliances, and maintain sustainable group sizes. In this thesis, we take a three-phased approach to bioinspiration: in the first phase, we produce agent-based models of specific social behaviors observed in nature. The goal of these models is to capture the underlying biological phenomenon, yet remain simple so that the models are amenable to analysis. In the second phase, we produce bio-inspired algorithms that are based on the simple biological models produced in the first phase. Moreover, these algorithms are developed in the context of specific coordination tasks, e.g., the multi-agent foraging task. In the final phase of this work, we tailor these algorithms to produce coordination strategies that are ready to be deployed in target applications.

Orientador: Fernando Antônio Campos Gomide / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T03:39:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Walter_IgorAlexandre_D.pdf: 1762436 bytes, checksum: 257485271a6580f86b0b466799ceff14 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Sugerimos uma abordagem evolutiva para o projeto de estratégias de interação em sistemas multiagentes, especialmente estratégias de oferta modeladas como sistemas baseados em regras nebulosas. O objetivo é a aprendizagem das estratégias de oferta em leilões em modelos em que a base de conhecimento sofre evolução para melhorar o desempenho dos agentes atuando em um ambiente competitivo. Dados para aprendizagem e otimização das estratégias são raros em ambientes competitivos como os leilões. Introduzimos um modelo de sistema genético fuzzy (GFS) cujos operadores genéticos utilizam uma representação de tamanho variável do cromossomo e uma relação hierárquica estabelecida através do fitness dos indivíduos, em um esquema que explora e explota o espaço de busca ao longo das gerações. A evolução de estratégias de interação permite a descoberta de comportamentos dos agentes previamente desconhecidos e inesperados, permitindouma análise mais rica dos mecanismos de negociação e seu papel como protocolo de coordenação. A aplicação da abordagem proposta no mercado de energia elétrica permite a simulação destes mercados através da evolução de estratégias de oferta (bidding) em leilões de energia. A reestruturação destes mercados nas economias contemporâneas apresenta novos desafios e oportunidades, uma vez que não há consenso sobre qual seria sua melhor organização. A evolução da estrutura organizacional destes mercados salienta a falta de discernimento sobre as principais questões a serem analisadas e levadas em consideração. Argumenta-se que a abordagem econômica neoclássica se mostra limitada na análise dos efeitos da reestruturação e no estudo do comportamento dos agentes econômicos competindo nos mercados de energia elétrica reestruturados. Apresentamos uma arquitetura computacional inspirada na Economia Computacional baseada em Agentes que permite a modelagem, estudo e simulação destes mercados. Aplicamos ferramentas de inteligência computacional adequadas à concepção dos agentes participantes nos mercados de energia e que podem ser estendidas a outros mecanismos de mercado e negociação. Os mercados de energia elétrica são sistemas complexos habitados por agentes econômicos com interesse próprio que interagem entre si. Concluímos que é natural modelar e simular estes mercados como sistemas multiagentes. A evolução de estratégias de oferta permite a descoberta de comportamentos que auxiliam na tomada de decisão de um participante e na avaliação do mecanismo de negociação por parte de seus projetistas / Abstract: We suggest an evolutionary approach to design interaction strategies for multiagent systems, focusing on strategies modeled as fuzzy rule-based systems. The aim is to learn models represented by evolving knowledge bases to achieve agents' performance improvement when playing in a competitive environment. In competitive situations data for learning and tuning are rare and rule bases must jointly evolve with the databases. We introduce an evolutionary algorithm whose operators use variable length chromosome, a hierarchical relationship among individuals through fitness, and a scheme that successively explores and exploits the search space along generations. Evolution of interaction strategies uncovers unknown and unexpected agent behaviors and allows a richer analysis of negotiation mechanisms and their role as a coordination protocol. An application concerning an electricity market illustrates the effectiveness of the approach and allows to simulate the market through evolutionary bidding strategies. The restructuring process of power markets raises new challenges and opportunities, since there is no consensual market architecture. The evolution of the power industry organization shows a lack of insight about the issues to be addressed and taken into account. Several authors have considered the available tools based on the neoclassical economics theory a limited approach to analyze the effects of the industry restructuring and to study economical agents behavior participating in a restructured electricity market. We present Artificial Economy Multiagent System (AEMAS), a computational architecture inspired on Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) that allows to model, study and simulate a power market. We apply Computational Intelligence tools to conceive the market agents that we expect could be extended to other negotiation environments. A power market is a complex system populated by self interested economical agents that interact. We conclude that it is feasible to model and simulate these markets on a multiagent system based approach. The evolution of bidding strategies allows to uncover new and unexpected behaviors that help to address the negotiation mechanism analysis by its designers and to support a market player decision process / Doutorado / Engenharia de Computação / Doutor em Engenharia Elétrica