Built infrastructure for water and energy supply, transportation, and other such services underpins human well-being and socioeconomic development. A fundamental understanding of how infrastructure design and user strategies interact can guide important design decisions as well as policy formulation for ensuring long-term infrastructure viability in conjunction with improved individual user benefits. In this work, an agent based model (ABM) is developed to study this issue for the specific case of irrigation canals. Cooperatively maintained irrigation canals serve essential roles in sustaining agriculture-based economies in many regions. Canal system design can strongly affect benefits derived by distributed users, regional agricultural output, and the long-term viability of the shared infrastructure itself. Here, an ABM is used to investigate how an option to use an independent water source interacts with canal design to affect canal maintenance cooperation and farmer income. The independent water source is stylized as a well that provides access to groundwater and represents a strategically robust design option; a design option that reduces the implementer's utility vulnerability to unfavorable actions by other actors. Research in other systems has demonstrated that strategically robust designs can improve both implementer utility and the probability of collaboration. The results of this research, in contrast, demonstrate that the option of individual resource access, the strategically robust design option, as represented by a well, reduces cooperative maintenance in most cases. However, wells also improve farmer income, especially for downstream farmers that are most affected by water theft.

中文翻译：

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个别资源获取策略对协作维护灌溉基础设施的影响

供水和能源供应、交通和其他此类服务的基础设施建设支撑着人类福祉和社会经济发展。对基础设施设计和用户策略如何相互作用的基本了解可以指导重要的设计决策和政策制定，以确保基础设施的长期可行性以及改善的个人用户利益。在这项工作中，开发了一种基于代理的模型（ABM）来针对灌溉渠的具体情况研究这个问题。合作维护的灌溉渠在许多地区维持农业经济方面发挥着重要作用。运河系统设计可以强烈影响分布式用户带来的效益、区域农业产出以及共享基础设施本身的长期生存能力。在这里，ABM 用于研究使用独立水源的选择如何与运河设计相互作用，以影响运河维护合作和农民收入。独立的水源被设计为一口井，可以获取地下水，代表了一种战略上稳健的设计选择；一种设计选项，可以减少实施者的实用程序对其他参与者不利行为的脆弱性。对其他系统的研究表明，战略上稳健的设计可以提高实施者的效用和协作的可能性。相比之下，这项研究的结果表明，在大多数情况下，单独资源访问的选择，即以井为代表的战略上稳健的设计选择，可以减少合作维护。然而，打井也可以提高农民的收入，特别是对于受盗水影响最严重的下游农民来说。