ABMUS2022: Workshop on Agent-Based Modelling of Urban Systems

The workshop Programme and Proceedings for ABMUS2022 are now available. The workshop will take place on 10th May, 20:00-24:00 (Aukland, UTC+12) on Zoom. To register please complete the registration form.

Full details of all workshops that are taking place in 2022 are available on the AAMAS website.

About ABMUS

ABMUS is a workshop where urban and geo-spatial modellers get together in a focused session, during the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). The ABMUS2022 workshop on Agent-Based Modelling of Urban Systems will be held online on 10 May 2022 as part of the AAMAS2022 conference. In 2022 the conference was due to take place in Auckland, New Zealand, but due to the pandemic the conference and the AMBUS workshop will be held virtually.

The central goal of this workshop is to bring together the community of researchers and practitioners who use agent-based models and multi-agent systems to understand and manage cities and urban infrastructure systems. Through the exchange of ideas and state-of-the-art within this area, we will pool together current thinking to discuss avenues of fruitful research and methodological challenges we face in building robust, realistic, and trusted models of urban systems. Drawing from recognised challenges faced by the modeling community through the COVID-19 pandemic and similar public policy crises, the overarching theme for the workshop this year will be ‘Trust, Transparency and Translation’. Participants will be asked to describe how their models are creating a bridge between the synthetic and real worlds, and making their way into real-world policy and decision-making. This year, we invite presentations that describe how researchers construct their models, demonstrate results, work with policy and decision-makers, and how these processes either facilitate or hinder the process of urban systems model building from the modellers perspective. We will discuss challenges associated with model development, data interoperability, consistent representation of space and time, as well as developments in interfaces and stakeholder engagement.

ABMUS2022: 'Trust, Transparency and Translation'

We invite submissions from researchers and practitioners who use agent-based models and agent systems to understand, explore, and manage cities and urban infrastructure systems. The overarching theme for 2022 is Trust, Transparency and Translation. Participants will be asked to describe how their models are creating a bridge between the synthetic and real worlds, and making their way into real-world policy and decision-making. This year, we invite presentations that describe how researchers construct their models, demonstrate results, work with policy and decision-makers, and how these processes either facilitate or hinder the process of urban systems model building from the modellers perspective. We will discuss challenges associated with model development, data interoperability, consistent representation of space and time, as well as developments in interfaces and stakeholder engagement.

Large scale urban simulation applications
Urban policy modelling simulation
Spatially explicit micro-simulation modelling
Agent-based modelling of urban transport, land-use, housing, energy, health, etc.
Simulation of household behaviour and technology adoption
Localized population synthesis
Multi-scale urban systems (temporal and spatial)
Social simulation of demographic transitions
Model development and co-development processes and protocols
Data structures for simulating urban environments
(Multi-)agent systems to provide decision support in e.g. transport, energy and air quality
Connection of simulation models to social and geographical theory
Government and industry engagement in model development and uptake
Processes of model co-development to enhance decision-making in urban systems
Development in model interfaces and engagement that enhance model uptake
Internet of Things (IoT), open data and data interoperability for modelling

The workshop recognises the importance of allowing delegates the opportunity to discuss the topics and so mixes short paper presentations with longer discussions and questions. If accepted, each presenter will be given a short time slot (max 10 minutes) to introduce their paper and/or case study, and views on the workshop theme. After three presentations there will be 20-30 minutes of discussion in which presenters will act as panel members in direct discussion with the ABMUS audience. We are pleased to confirm that ABMUS2022 will have a keynote presentation by Prof Frank Dignum who will share his thoughts on the theme for this year: Trust, Transparency and Translation. The full agenda will be published as soon as possible. In 2022 the AAMAS conference, and the AMBUS workshop, will be held virtually.

Papers should be submitted as an extended abstract (2-4 pages) through Easy Chair (details below).

For more information please contact:

Jason Thompson -- jason.thompson@unimelb.edu.au
Minh Le Kieu -- minh.kieu@auckland.ac.nz
Koen van Dam -- k.van-dam@imperial.ac.uk

Submission and important dates

How to submit a paper

Participants are invited to submit an extended abstract (2-4 pages, plus references) describing their work on one or more of the topics relevant to the workshop. Your abstract should include a title as well as all authors and affiliations. It should articulate the objectives of the paper and provide a brief but thorough description of the research related to the theme of the workshop and the expected gain by those attending the presentation. Accepted authors will be invited to submit a full paper after the workshop to be included in the post-workshop proceedings. All submissions to the workshop will be reviewed by the organising committee and program committee, with at least two independent reviews per paper.

Authors are requested to prepare their papers by following the LNCS Springer instructions, preferably using the LaTeX template provided but an MS Word template is also available.

All papers must be submitted through the workshop's EasyChair page:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=abmus2022

Important dates

~~25 February 2022~~ 13 March 2022: extended deadline for abstract submissions
31 March 2022: Notification of acceptance following the review process
29 April 2022: Deadline for submitting camera-ready papers for inclusion in the pre-proceedings
10 May 2022: ABMUS workshop (online)
Following the workshop, invitation for full papers

Organisation

The organising committee consists of:

Dr Jason Thompson, University of Melbourne
Dr Minh Le Kieu, University of Auckland
Dr Koen H. van Dam, Imperial College London
Prof Nick Malleson, University of Leeds
Prof Alison Heppenstall, University of Glasgow
Dr Jiaqi Ge, University of Leeds

Proceedings and special issues

All accepted extended abstracts will be made available in the pre-proceedings. Please note that at least one author must register for the workshop in order for a paper to appear in the workshop proceedings. After the conference all presenters will be invited to submit a full paper for the ABMUS2022 proceedings to appear as a special issue (tbc).

The ABMUS2022 workshop proceedings (extended abstracts) are now available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19733800.

Programme

ABMUS2022 will take place on 10th May, 20:00-24:00 (Aukland, UTC+12) on Zoom. To register please complete the registration form.

Sessions consist of 4 x 10 minute presentations and a 20 minute panel discussion on the theme. We are pleased to welcome Professor Frank Dignum to give a keynote presentation on this year's ABMUS theme.

Schedule:

20:00 – 20:05 – Welcome – Minh Kieu
20:05 – 20:50 – Keynote Presentation – Professor Frank Dignum
20:50 – 21:50 - Session 1 - Methodology
21:50 – 22:00 - Break
22:00 – 23:00 - Session 2 - Urban development
23:00 – 24:00 - Session 3 - Transport
00:00 – 00:10 – Wrap-up and closing remarks

Session 1 - Methodology

Minh Kieu, Iris Meredith and Andrea Raith. Synthetic generation of individual transport data: the case of Smart Card data
Liu Yang and Koen van Dam. Data-driven agent-based model development to support human-centric TOD design
Rajith Vidanaarachchi, Jason Thompson, Branislava Godic and Rod McClure. AgentsX.jl — An Extended Julia Framework for Exploring Urban and Social Systems
Gayani Senanayake and Minh Kieu. Simulating civil emergency evacuation with Inverse Generative Social Science

Session 2: Urban development

Erik Wiegel and Neil Yorke-Smith. No Hope for First-Time Buyers? Towards Agent-Based Market Analysis of Urban Housing Balance
Sabine Timpf and Marie-Rose Degg. Agent-Based Modelling of People's Behaviour in Public Parks
Emily West, Rembrandt Koppelaar, Aitziber Egusquiza Ortega, Angela Santangelo and Eleonora Melandri. An agent-based model of greening a city for reducing pluvial flooding at a cultural heritage site
Henri Meeß, Jeremias Gerner, Daniel Hein, Stefanie Schmidtner and Gordon Elger. Real World Traffic Optimization by Reinforcement Learning: A Concept

Session 3: Transport

Ilya Turchaninov, Koen van Dam, Gonzalo Bustos Turu and Salvador Acha. Transport electrification and fast-charging expansion: A case study in Alaska
Yulin Zhang, William Macke, Jiaxun Cui, Daniel Urieli and Peter Stone. Learning a Robust Multiagent Driving Policy for Traffic Congestion Reduction
Yi Cheng Ong, Nicos Protopapas, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Enrico H. Gerding and Sebastian Stein. Preference-Aware Dynamic Ridesharing
Yifeng Zhang, Mehul Damani and Guillaume Sartoretti. Multi-Agent Traffic Signal Control via Distributed RL with Spatial and Temporal Feature Extraction

Previous ABMUS workshops

Previously, ABMUS2016 was held in Singapore during AAMAS2016 on the 10th of May 2016, ABMUS2017 was held in Sao Paulo during AAMAS2017 on the 8th of May 2017 and afterwards ABMUS2018 was held in Stockholm during the Federated AI Meeting (FAIM2018) which included the AAMAS2018 conference and IJCAI-ECAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence). In 2019, ABMUS2019 took place at AAMAS2019 in Montreal, Canada on the 14th of May 2019. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the 2020 workshop (which should have taken place as part of the AAMAS2020 conference in Aukland 9-13 May) was canceled. ABMUS2021 took place online as part of AAMAS2021. The proceedings for ABMUS2020 (postponed due to the pandemic) and ABMUS2021 are now available with DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.14579604.v1.