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[udig-devel] Agent Based Modeling
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Our scientific visualization and agent based modeling group,
redfish.com, is starting to use GIS in our work quite a bit. We've
done a wildfire evacuation model (using Python's gdal/shapelib
libraries and Processing.org's 3D visualization with DEM/Satellite
imagery), a crowd evacuation model (using netlogo and GIS raster
data), and sea-level analysis using Python and Google Earth.
This works fine, but we'd like to become more expert in the GIS
world, so are evaluating the open platforms available (our work is
open source as far as possible). So we've been looking at the
alternatives and stumbled across uDig's great project (thanks!).
A couple of ideas have come up for us:
1 - A new layer type called an "active layer". This would form the
basis for agent based modeling on top of GIS data. Note: ABM is
described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_based_model
Basically ABMs are comprised of many "agents" which are independent
software objects with their own local rules rather than a centralized
"intelligence". Our models often have 10-100 thousand agents. Cars
on a street, investors in a market, people in a crowd, birds in a
flock, ants in a swarm, and so on.
We've had success using non-ABM systems for modeling .. Processing
being the best recent example. Do you think this would work with
uDig? The idea would be for a top-level layer to be able to inquire
about its environment (roads, rivers, houses etc) and to be able to
move around in this.
To get an idea of this sort of thing, here is a stadium evacuation
done in Processing:
http://backspaces.net/models/Stadium/applet/
It has active agents (the moving point) running on Processing's
stadium wireframe. We'd like the same thing .. for example boats on
the canals of Venice!
2 - 3D: Its surprisingly useful to use 3D in modeling. Netlogo lets
you build a 2D model, then pop it into a 3D view where you easily
zoom around to see details. JOGL has helped Java a bunch in this
regard.
So the two questions are:
- Would it be easy to build an "active layer" for many agents to move
on within uDig? We'd assume this might require double buffering or
similar to make the static GIS data not be redrawn each "frame" of
the agent "movie".
- Can we currently pop a set of layers into 3D with uDig?
Thanks for the help!
-- Owen
Owen Densmore http://redfish.com
