On the development of Agent-Based Models for infrastructure evolution
NGI'08: Proc. NGInfra-IEEE Int'l Scientific Conf.: Building Networks for a Brighter Future, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, IEEE Press, (2008)Abstract
To achieve sustainability of our ever changing and evolving world
system, we must view it as a control/engineering problem on a massive
scale. Infrastructure systems are an essential part of this world
and are critical to achieve sustainability. We conjecture that in
order to sufficiently understand and manage these systems we need
models that match their scale, complexity and evolutionary nature.
In order to eventually capture the full diversity and adaptivity
of the 'world system', and specifically the infrastructures that
sustain it, we have developed an evolving, modular, approach for
developing models of infrastructure evolution. This approach combines
a staged and tested social process that enables model specification,
a modular Java based simulation engine and an ontology, which is
a formal language specification that uniquely defines the interface
between minds (knowledge) and simulation models (executable code).
The ultimate goal is to underpin decision-making in or on infrastructure
systems. In the paper we will introduce the basic requirements necessary
for creation of the evolving modeling and illustrate the adaptive
approach for Agent Based Model development by showing a series of
ever more complex models.