Agent-Based Modeling and the City: A Gallery of Applications

Agent-based modeling is a powerful simulation technique that allows one to build artificial worlds and populate these worlds with individual agents. Each agent or actor has unique behaviors and rules which govern their interactions with each other and their environment. It is through these interactions that more macro-phenomena emerge: for example, how individual pedestrians lead to the emergence of crowds. Over the past two decades, with the growth of computational power and data, agent-based models have evolved into one of the main paradigms for urban modeling and for understanding the various processes which shape our cities. Agent-based models have been developed to explore a vast range of urban phenomena from that of micro-movement of pedestrians over seconds to that of urban growth over decades and many other issues in between. In this chapter, we introduce readers to agent-based modeling from simple abstract applications to those representing space utilizing geographical data not only for the creation of the artificial worlds but also for the validation and calibration of such models through a series of example applications. We will then discuss how big data, data mining, and machine learning techniques are advancing the field of agent-based modeling and demonstrate how such data and techniques can be leveraged into these models, giving us a new way to explore cities.