The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for Geospatial Simulation

In The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for. Geospatial Simulation, CASA’s Andrew Crooks (blog) introduces Repast and its ability to incorporate geospatial data to build an environment and to create agents to explore different types of phenomena. He shortly introduces some geosptatial simulation constructed from minimalist academic models based upon ideal assumptions, to large scale decision support systems based upon real-world data. These include:

• disaster management such as a Sarin attack in Manhattan, the spread of infectious diseases and a food poisoning outbreak
• pedestrian modelling both in retail and emergency evacuation
• urban dynamics (see Barros, J. (2004), Urban Growth in Latin American Cities: exploring urban dynamics through agent-based simulation), segregation, residential and business location
• models in which mobile agents travel and interact on rugged terrain or on network landscapes at any scale from rooms within buildings to urban neighbourhoods to large geographic networks of cities. (see GeoGraph)
• study land use change
• geographic conflict research(see GROWLab)

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the possible use of “census data” generated by digital footprints (user-generated data, cellphone data) to model urban tourism (some profiles of tourists) dynamism both in time and space. It would be one way to validate the data (compare the simulation with survey data) and test different scenarios over several cities, thus aiding planning tourism. Appetizer before reading Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals.