Properties of Recreational Boat Traffic

  There are currently no recreational boat traffic simulations that adequately represent boat traffic in spatial and temporal scales to test hypotheses about monitoring strategies. Additionally, there were no data sets available from which macroscopic inferences could be made about recreational boat traffic in sufficient detail to satisfactorally employ top-down numerical techniques such as differential equations or Forrester models.

A large part of boat traffic is dominated by factors that cannot be determined exactly through environmental characteristics (many decisions about where boats go are due as much to the caprice of the boaters as to environmental conditions). A model based on (biased) random events is needed to adequately capture this aspect of boat traffic, similar to the queuing models mentioned on page . Since it is not known beforehand what routes boats are going to use, it is required that a model be able to recreate boaters' paths as well as the times that trips were made.