ABMUS2016: The 1st International Workshop on Agent-based modelling of urban systems

This page is for the 2016 edition of ABMUS. For the current/upcoming edition please visit https://abmus.github.io/.

The ABMUS2016 workshop on Agent-based modelling of urban systems was held at the AAMAS2016 conference in Singapore on the 10th of May 2016. The archived website is available here.

Introduction

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

Proceedings and special issues

The ABMUS2016 proceedings are now available online as an LNAI volume:

The proceedings are currently, and for a limited time of four weeks, available for free download.

The ABMUS2016 pre-conference proceedings are also available for download.

Organising committee

  • Prof. Pascal Perez - University of Wollongong, Australia: pascal@uow.edu.au
  • Prof. Lin Padgham - RMIT, Australia: lin.padgham@rmit.edu.au
  • Prof. Kai Nagel - TU Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, Germany: nagel@vsp.tu-berlin.de
  • Prof. Ana L. C. Bazzan - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: bazzan@inf.ufrgs.br
  • Dr. Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad - University of Wollongong, Australia: mrad@uow.edu.au

Program committee

  • Prof. Eric J. Miller - University of Toronto, Canada
  • Prof. Michael Batty - University College London, UK
  • Prof. Kay W. Axhausen - ETH Zürich, Switzerland
  • Prof. Peter Campbell - University of Wollongong, Australia
  • Prof. Jörg P. Müller - TU Clausthal, Germany
  • Prof. Eric Cornelis - Universite de Namur, Belgium
  • Prof. Arnaud Banos - CNRS, France
  • Prof. Kouros Mohammadian - University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
  • Prof. Ram M. Pendyala - Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
  • Prof. Amal Kumarage - University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
  • Prof. Christopher J. Pettit - University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Prof. Robert Tanton - University of Canberra, Australia
  • Prof. Majid Sarvi - University of Melbourne, Australia
  • A/Prof. Stephane Galland - Université de Technologie de Belfort, France
  • Dr. Dhirendra Singh - RMIT University, Australia
  • Dr. Bilal Farooq - École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
  • Dr. Taha H. Rashidi - University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Dr. Michael North - Argonne National Laboratory, USA
  • Dr. Vadim Sokolov - Argonne National Laboratory, USA
  • Antonin Danalet - École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland
  • Ricardo Hurtubia - Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
  • Flurin Hänseler - Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL, Switzerland
  • Zachary Patterson - Concordia University, Canada
  • Ismaïl Saadi - Université de Liège, Belgium
  • Melvin Wong - Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
  • Fernando dos Santos - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil