ABMUS 2016 - 1st Workshop on Agent Based Modelling of Urban Systems (ABMUS 2016)

Modern cities have become complex self-organising socio-technical systems. As such, their future is unpredictable beyond broad demographic and land use trends. This uncertainty creates a serious challenge for traditional urban planning as social, economic and land use dynamics dynamically interact at a pace never experienced before. Changes in household configurations, individual attributes, and community structures have strong in influences on the quality and types of services governments are required to provide. Thus, planners are under increasing pressure to develop robust policies that govern which area receives what services and why. In this context, it is essential for analytical tools and models to embrace this complexity for their outputs to be useful to urban planners, managers and residents.
Amongst other innovative tools, spatial micro-simulation and agent-based modelling (ABM) techniques can be used to simulate the actions and interactions of autonomous agents with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. The advantage of such techniques is to allow for the modelling of socio-demographic heterogeneity and the dynamic feedback between urban planning and social responses.
Multi-agent-based models have long provided the technological flexibility for such a paradigm shift but it is fair to recognize that, too often, scalability or statistical validity issues have limited their usefulness in large urban contexts. Hence, there is a need to develop robust geo-statistical methods to create, localize and evolve large synthetic populations for urban systems. The challenge is to move from system-based approaches to individual activity based ones while preserving the statistical significance of demographic distributions and activity patterns in space and time.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in building large scale agent based urban simulations to discuss issues, techniques and approaches relevant to this effort.
We are especially interested in innovative and robust geo-statistical methods for multi-agent-based models.
Workshop topics include but are not limited to:
Localized population synthesis
Multiple sample-based geo-statistical calibrations
Social simulation of demographic transitions
Spatial micro-simulation modelling
Use of mobile technology to validate activity patterns
Agent-based modelling of urban transport, land-use, housing or energy demand
Techniques for integrating independently developed components
Large scale urban simulation applications
Agent based platforms for urban simulation