---
id: people/olivier-barreteau
about:
  label: Olivier Barreteau
  description: >-
    Water scientist at INRAE in Montpellier who builds agent-based models and
    role-playing games for negotiated water management; first author of the
    companion modelling charter.
  tags:
    - water
    - agent-based
    - role-playing games
    - companion modelling
person:
  affiliation: 'INRAE, G-EAU research unit'
  role: water scientist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'Olivier Barreteau (JASSS author note, 2003)'
      url: 'https://www.jasss.org/6/2/1/Barreteau.html'
    - title: 'Our Companion Modelling Approach (Barreteau and others, JASSS, 2003)'
      url: 'https://www.jasss.org/6/2/1.html'
    - title: Annuaire (UMR G-EAU)
      url: 'https://g-eau.fr/?AnnuaireGEau'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Olivier Barreteau is a water scientist at INRAE in Montpellier, in the G-EAU research unit, where he belongs to the PartiScipationS team.[^3] His PhD, done with CIRAD, applied multi-agent systems to coordination among farmers in the irrigated systems of the middle valley of the Senegal river. His research since has been on tools to support negotiation, notably agent-based models and role-playing games, for local and negotiated management of water basins.[^1] In 2003 he was with Cemagref's irrigation research unit.[^1] His 2007 habilitation was on models and processes of collective decision in the concerted management of water resources.[^3] The theses he has supervised include one coupling agent-based and agro-hydrological models of collective irrigation in the Buëch basin in France and one using forum theatre for participatory hydrogeology on the salinisation of groundwater in Senegal.[^3]

He is first author of "Our Companion Modelling Approach", the 2003 charter in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation that set out [companion modelling](/communication/companion-modelling/), and co-author of the 1999 chapter the charter cites as the start of the approach.[^2]