Spatiotemporal Modeling of the Smart City Residents’ Activity with Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The article proposes the concept of modeling that uses multi-agent systems of mutual interactions between city residents as well as interactions between residents and spatial objects. Adopting this perspective means treating residents, as well as buildings or other spatial objects, as distinct agents that exchange multifaceted packages of information in a dynamic and non-linear way. The exchanged information may be reinforced or diminished during the process, which may result in changing the social activity of the residents. Utilizing Latour’s actor−network theory, the authors developed a model for studying the relationship between demographic and social factors, and the diversified spatial arrangement and the structure of a city. This concept was used to model the level of residents’ trust spatiotemporally and, indirectly, to study the level of social (geo)participation in a smart city. The devised system, whose test implementation as an agent-based system was done in the GAMA: agent-based, spatially explicit, modeling and simulation platform, was tested on both model and real data. The results obtained for the model city and the capital of Poland, Warsaw, indicate the significant and interdisciplinary analytical and scientific potential of the authorial methodology in the domain of geospatial science, geospatial data models with multi-agent systems, spatial planning, and applied social sciences.

Keywords

• multi-agent systems
• smart city development
• spatiotemporal modeling
• actor–network theory
• geoparticipation
• social interactions