Holonic Modelling of Large Scale Geographic Environments

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model Virtual Geographic Environments (VGE) which uses the holonic approach as a computational geographic methodology and holarchy as organizational principle. Our approach allows to automatically build VGE using data provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS ) and enables an explicit representation of the geographic environment for Situated Multi-Agent Systems (SMAS) in which agents are situated and with which they interact. In order to take into account geometric, topologic, and semantic characteristics of the geographic environment, we propose the use of the holonic approach to build the environment holarchy. We illustrate our holonic model using two different environments: an urban environment and a natural environment.