Using OpenTTD as an economic simulation

[DeVires]

Hello,

I need to code a economic simulation for my PHD thesis and was wondering if it is possible to create a economic simulation of a supply chain in OpenTTD and how much effort this would be. I would be very grateful if someone with experience in OpenTTD could estimate the effort.

The economic simulation should do the following:

Simulating a supply chain in a certain industry e.g. furniture. Some Lumber Mills produces wood which is needed by the Sawmills.
The Sawmill uses different criteria to choose from which supplier wood is bought.
The criteria could be: Price, Conformity, Quality, Delivery an many more.
The Lumber Mill is in charge to deliver the ordered wood.
The Lumber Mills should varey in price (maybe depending on distance to the sawmill) and quality.
Events as production downtimes and traffic jams should occur.
The demand of wood by the sawmill should be variable.

As my C++ skills are quite decent i would like to use the gamescript.
I think every Sawmill and Lumber Mill can be represented by AI. But I dont know whether it is possible that the AI can exchange goods and money.
Any help or tips are appreciated maybe someone has done something similar and could tell about their experience.

Thank you
David

[_dp_]

Except for few methods all gamescipt can do is to play as a regular player. If you can simulate what you want to do by simply playing multiple companies then yes, GS can help. If not it's likely useless to you.

Also OpenTTD gameplay is extremely hard to modify in any meaningful manner. So it's highly likely it will be much easier for you to do that simulation without OpenTTD.

[Pyoro]

Cargo by and large is cargo, and there's really not much in terms of meaningful ways for companies to interact with each other except for competing with station ratings. The work you'd need to do to adapt the code I can only imagine as "enormous".

If you really want to do something yourself and there isn't anything suitable around I'd probably go for something in Twine or whatever. Like, for example have a bunch of pre-defined Lumber Mills with certain numbers for your criteria, then give the player a number of points to distribute to increase/decrease their own criteria for their Lumber Mill (so for example spent points to decrease prize or increase quality...). Then press Simulate and have whatever formula you apply calculate how much each company sells. etc.

And then you can go and make it as complicated as you want from there. ^^