An ontology-based template of user-actor to support agent-based simulation in built environments

The behavior of a human being in a building, its activities, its interactions with it and with other people are certainly a highly complex phenomenon extremely hard to predict and evaluate. At the same time, the response of a built environment to future users‘ needs is one of the key factors of its performance. The Agent-based Modeling paradigm is considered potentially the best way to represent human behavior but, in the building design field, its experiences are limited to representation of partial aspects of human behavior in discrete events. Currently, a more "extended" representation of human behavior able to offer an overview of the human activities related to the building functioning‘, is missing,. This lack is due to the complexity of interaction among users and built environment, and to the extensive knowledge, provided by different disciplines, needed to reliably represent it. The proposed research focuses on the construction of a general representation template of user-actor, easy to implement and flexible enough to structure the large amount of data affecting human behavior. The development of the ontology-based template shown in this paper can lead to a user-agent‘s entity whose parameters and behavioral rules can encode and represent several aspects‘ of real users and their interactions with the other entities (building components, furniture, other people) in a built environment.

[1]  Tf Thomas Krijnen,et al.  Airport Schiphol - Behavioural Simulation of a Design Concept , 2009 .

[2]  H. Simon.  The Sciences of the Artificial, (Third edition) , 1997 .

[3]  Yehuda E. Kalay,et al.  Simulating Human Behaviour in Built Environments , 2005 .

[4]  Ahmad Rafi Mohamed Eshaq,et al.  The Importance of Virtual Environments in the Design of Electronic Games and Their Relevance to Architecture , 2002 .

[5]  Antonio Fioravanti,et al.  Function & Action: Verifying a functional program in a game-oriented environment , 2010, eCAADe proceedings.

[6]  Eric Bonabeau,et al.  Agent-based modeling: Methods and techniques for simulating human systems , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .

[8]  Alexander Koutamanis,et al.  Simulation for Analysis: Requirements from Architectural Design , 1996 .

[9]  Nicola Guarino,et al.  Formal ontology, conceptual analysis and knowledge representation , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[10]  Antonio Fioravanti,et al.  An Ontology-based Knowledge Representation Model for Cross-Disciplinary Building Design: A General Template , 2009 .

[11]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .

[12]  Gülen Çagdas,et al.  COMPUTATION: The New Realm of Architectural Design , 2009 .

[13]  Gülen Çağdaş,et al.  Agent-Based System for Modeling User Behavior in Shopping Malls MallSim , 2008 .

[14]  Michael J. North,et al.  AGENT-BASED MODELING AND SIMULATION: DESKTOP ABMS , 2007 .

[15]  Nigel Gilbert,et al.  Platforms and methods for agent-based modeling , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[16]  Wei Yan,et al.  Automatic Walkthrough Utilizing Building Information Modeling to Facilitate Architectural Visualization , 2008 .

[17]  Bryan Lawson,et al.  How Designers Think , 1980 .