Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing opens

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent weeks but I been busy finishing up my course about Agent-based Modeling of Urban Systems at Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University, along with writing a few new papers.

One thing I have been meaning to blog about for a while is the opening of the Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing. Actually the crossing opened on the 2 November 2009 but its still worth blogging about. A previous post (click here) shows what the planners had in mind (Click here to read the BBC's coverage of the event).

The two movies below show what the designers had in mind using a pedestrian model created by Atkins Intelligent Space which closely matches how people are actually using the crossing (the second movie) and how at the intersection of the crossing, the density of people restricts movement.

The movie below shows what the designers had in mind:

While the second movie shows what it actually looks like and how people are using it.

More about "Oxford Circus 'X-crossing' opens", posted with vodpod

On a side note there is also a lot of work going on about how placing obstacles near exits to speed up the flow of crowds exiting large events such as rock concerts or football games (click here to read more).

Agents on campus

I thought it was time I started exploring Repast Simphony and GIS data for US. So following the excellent tutorial by Nick Malleson entitled "RepastCity - A demo virtual city" which demonstrates how to load up several shapefiles and move agents around a road network (the code is also very well documented).

The movie below shows the George Mason campus (2005). The GIS data comes from the GMU Library in the form of shapefiles. Within the model we have agents (red stars), one for each building (black polygons). These agents choose a building at random and use the footpaths (thin grey/blue lines) to navigate to the chosen building. Additional layers are also represented including: car parks and roads (grey/blue areas); and streams grey blue) and a pond (green)¹.




Another interesting tutorial is by Karl Liebert which discusses how create a basic GIS model in Repast Simphony.

¹ For some reason the colors have been messed up in the conversion from computer to Vimeo.

TravellerSim: ABM for Growing Settlement Structures and Territories

I just come across another interesting NetLogo model while browsing through the interesting Electric Archaeology: Digital Media for Learning and Research blog written by Shawn Graham. Shawn along with James Steiner (who has a great site called turtleZERO) have created a agent-based model called TravellerSim which explores growing settlement structures and territories.

To quote from the blog post:

"Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent-based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The networks may then be analyzed using social-networks analyzes tools to identify individual sites important on various network-analytic grounds, and at another level, territories of similarly connected settlements. We present two case studies to assess the validity of the tool: Geometric Greece and Protohistoric Central Italy."

The full reference of the model is:

Graham, S. and J. Steiner (2008) “Travellersim: Growing Settlement Structures and Territories with Agent-Based Modelling” in Jeffrey T. Clark and Emily M. Hagemeister (eds) Digital Discovery: Exploring New Frontiers in Human Heritage. CAA 2006. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Proceedings of the 34th Conference, Fargo, United States, April 2006. Budapest: Archaeolingua.

The NetLogo model can be found here and the blog post here. Furthermore, Shawn has a number of other agent-based models which might be of interest. These can be found here.

TourSim: Agent-based modeling for Tourism Planning

While reading the 7.5th Floor blog, I cam across an interesting post about the use of agent-based modeling for tourism/recreational planning. The post talks about the TourSim model developed by Peter Johnson. The model is created using AnyLogic and explores tourists visiting Nova Scotia and the destinations they visit under different scenarios. Peter provides a tutorial about using the model along with data sources used in creating and verifying this model. As with many other AnyLogic models (click here to see some demos), not only is it highly visual but can be run in a web browser. Further details about TourSim can be found here.

Virtual Worlds for teaching GIS

Following on from our previous posts on Second Life (SL), I just came across a post on the ArcUser Online website which talks about how SL can be used for GIS education. The article is by Michael DeMers of New Mexico State University. The paper is entitled "Inside the Metaverse" and has three nice podcasts accompanying it.

The YouTube movie below gives an idea about the potential for teaching GIS within virtual worlds (Thanks to Digital Urban for the link).