Santa Fe Complex at MIT

Two Santa Fe Complex practitioners, Fabio Carrera and Stephen Guerin, visited MIT this week for a presentation on agent-based modeling entitled ‘Agent-based City Knowledge with Ambient Computing.’ They discussed recent applications of agent-based GIS simulations to urban systems in the Spatial Database Management and Advanced Geographic Information Systems class in MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Carrera and Guerin presented interactive models on a physical sandtable, called the SimTable, designed for multi-agency emergence response training, incident command and community outreach.

The SimTable is able to measure the changing heights of the sand and create high-resolution digital terrain models of the surface. This GIS layer is combined with other climate and vegetation models to visualize realtime wildfire, flood and contaminant plume dynamics coupled with agent-based models of traffic evacuation and incident response teams. The table allows multiple users to interact with the 3D surface changing both the topography and interacting with the simulations. Example wildfire and crowd dynamics agent-based models will be demonstrated. Example video is available here.

Dr. Carrera concluded with a preview of development of an agent-based architecture for managing city information systems called City Knowledge base on his Ph.D. dissertation at MIT.