Multi-Agent Geosimulation in Support to Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning: COAs’ “What if” Analysis as an Example

Abstract

Multi-Agent Geosimulation (MAGS) is a relatively novel approach to model-building and application in the geographic sciences and geocomputing (Torrens, 2008). It is mainly characterized by the use of Agent-Based Models – particularly Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in order to model, simulate and study complex phenomena taking place in geographical environments (Benenson and Torrens, 2004; Moulin et al., 2003). Recent research works in MAGS focused on two main trends. The first trend consists in improving different conceptual and computational aspects of MAGS models such as development methodologies (Ali, 2008), 2D and 3D virtual geographic environments models (Silva et al., 2008; Paris et al., 2009), agents perception and navigation models (Silva et al., 2008), generic MAGS platforms (Blecic et al., 2008) and models calibration and validation (Hagen-Zanker and Martens, 2008). The second trend consists in applying MAGS techniques to solve new problems such as parking policies evaluation (Benenson et al., 2007), prediction of house prices evolution (Bossomaier et al., 2007) and public health risk management (Bouden et al., 2008), to mention a few. Although these works allow modeling and simulating several geospatial phenomena, they do not guarantee that the simulation results will be well understood by a human user. In fact, results of geosimulations are usually presented using statistical, mathematical and / or graphical techniques (Ali et al., 2007). The complexity of the simulated phenomena and the huge volume of generated data make these techniques difficult to be interpreted by users. Indeed, human reasoning is mainly qualitative and not quantitative. Therefore, we believe in the importance of linking MAGS models with qualitative reasoning techniques, and we think that this link will allow the development of new systems which support qualitative reasoning in spatial contexts. While some recent works have been interested in this issue (Furtao and Vasconcelos, 2007), to our knowledge there is a lack of works that address its theoretical and computational aspects. Our contribution in this chapter aims at proposing an approach that uses MAGS techniques to support qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning. Particularly, we are interested in supporting a specific kind of qualitative reasoning called “What-if” reasoning and its particular application to the planning of courses of actions 11