Reserve design is an important problem in wildlife conservation. The underlying aim of reserve design is to guarantee species' survival whilst minimising conservation costs. In the case of the Grey Wolf, their survival is based on stochastic dispersal, breeding, and death processes. And the conservation cost is related to the number of areas allocated for wolves to live in. To estimate the survival probability, we have built a model that simulates the whole population based on individual wolves in discrete time.

The overall aim of the research is to investigate the extent to which Simulation Optimisation can be used to tackle the wolf conservation problem. The results of experiments using the Chance Constrained Selection of the Best (CCSB) algorithm will be presented and discussed on the poster.