Fluid Dynamics and ABM used for the evacuation of a city

Emergencies are times of great uncertainty and while GIS has been used for a long time for planning evacuations, it has only been during the last few years that agent-based modeling (ABM) has been used to study peoples behavior in such situations.  In a recent article by Epstein et al. (2011), they combine Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and ABM to study urban evacuation planning.

CFD is used to model the airborne transport of contaminants, while the ABM  models the social dynamics of the population.  Coupling of the two allows for simulating how populations might respond to a physically realistic contaminant plume.

The movie below shows a hypothetical aerosol release in Los Angeles.

More information can be found at:

Epstein JM, Pankajakshan R, Hammond RA, 2011 Combining Computational Fluid Dynamics and Agent-Based Modeling: A New Approach to Evacuation Planning. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20139. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020139

FuturICT

What a great idea:

"The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to."

The movie below gives a nice overview of its aim:



More movies about the project can be found here or follow them on twitter

Virtual Geographic Environments

A quick note for a new book entitled "Virtual Geographic Environments" from ESRI Press who write:

"Virtual Geographic Environments, edited by Hui Lin and Michael Batty, collects key papers that define the current momentum in GIS and "virtual geographies." Contributions by leading members of the geospatial community to Virtual Geographic Environments illustrate the cutting edge of GIScience, as well as new applications of GIS with the processing and delivery of geographic information through the Web and handheld devices, forming two major directions to these developments. The four-part organization leads from a primer on VGEs to virtual cities and landscapes, interface design and public participation, and finally mobile and networked VGEs. Current topics, such as crowd sourcing and related services, point to the development of new business models that merge proprietary and nonproprietary systems."

Andrew Hudson-Smith and myself have contributed a chapter entitled "The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life". The abstract for our paper is:

"Web 2.0, specifically The Cloud, GeoWeb and Wikitecture are revolutionising the way in which we present, share and analyse geographic data. In this paper we outline and provide working examples a suite of tools which are detailed below, aimed at developing new applications of GIS and related technologies. GeoVUE is one of seven nodes in the National Centre for e-Social Science whose mission it is to develop web-based technologies for the social and geographical sciences. The Node, based at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London has developed a suite of free software allowing quick and easy visualisation of geographic data in systems such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Crysis and Second Life. These tools address two issues, firstly that spatial data is still inherently difficult to share and visualise for the non-GIS trained academic or professional and secondly that a geographic data social network has the potential to dramatically open up data sources for both the public and professional geographer. With our applications of GMap Creator, and MapTube to name but two, we detail ways to intelligently visualise and share spatial data. This paper concludes with detailing usage and outreach as well as an insight into how such tools are already providing a significant impact to the outreach of geographic information."

Advanced GeoSimulation Models

Advanced GeoSimulation Models edited by Danielle Marceau and Itzhak Benenson brings together a number of authors that highlight the the frontier in geosimulation in particular, and in cellular automata and agent-based modelling in general.

Click here to see the forward by Mike Batty.

We have a chapter in the book entitled "Advances and Techniques for Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems" Belwo you can read the abstract of the chapter along with see some of our figures.


Abstract:

There is a growing interest in relating agent-based models to real-world locations by combining them with geographical information systems (GIS) which can be seen with the increase of geosimulation models in recent years. This coincides with the proliferation of digital data both in the two and three dimensions allowing one to construct detailed and extensive feature-rich and highly visual 3D city models. This chapter explores some of these developments in relation to our own initial work on building 3D geospatial agent-based models of urban systems and the technologies that allow for such models to be created. These range from coupling agent-based models with 3D visualizati on, to building 3D agent-based models in 3D animation and rendering packages, and to using 3D virtual worlds for the creation of agent-based models.

The  Swiss  Re  building  and  the  City  of  London  imported  into  the  Crysis  game  engine.

Full Reference:

Crooks, A. T., Hudson-Smith, A. and Patel, A. (2011), Advances and Techniques for Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems, in Marceau D. and Benenson, I. (eds.), Advanced Geosimulation Models, Bentham Science Publishers, Hilversum, The Netherlands, pp 49-65.(pdf) 

An agent-based model of the housing market

Why agent-based modeling? In the interview below  Doyne Farmer discuses his work with Rob Axtell and John Geanakoplos, who aim to create an agent-based model of the U.S. economy that will people make better understand past, and future, financial crises.

But going back to the question above, why agents? to quote from the SFI website: "Whereas a traditional economic model makes future predictions based on past market behavior and thus fails in unprecedented situations, their agent-based model takes into account the actions of individual decision makers, assigning behavioral rules to each agent in the model"