An Agent-Based Model for Public Security Strategies by Predicting Crime Patterns

Abstract

In recent years, statistical methods have been applied to the study of crime patterns. However, these schemes have several drawbacks that prevent accurate modeling of complex behaviors. Agent-based models (ABM) allow the modeling of human behavior by employing simple rules that consider each agent’s neighborhood. In this paper, a new agent-based model is proposed to emulate crime patterns produced by the interaction of different urban actors, such as offenders (criminals), citizens, and defenders (police officers). Using this approach, the simulation results provide escape trajectories and robbery frequencies that can be used to create or improve public security strategies. Although our scheme can be generically applied, we validated the model by considering different scenarios for the case of Guadalajara, Mexico. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme creates realistic offender behaviors that efficiently predict criminal patterns and provides essential data that allow the creation and improvement of public security strategies to reduce the number of crimes.

Keywords

• Agent-based model (ABM)
• crime simulations
• crime patterns
• routine activity
• computer simulation