Multi-agent Approach to Modeling the Dynamics of Urban Processes (on the Example of Urban Movements)

The choice of effective management decisions by city administrations on infrastructure development and resource allocation requires awareness of the processes that are going on. At the same time, the data for analyzing the situation are expensive and only a few cities in Russia can afford to purchase them. In this regard, the purpose of this study, conducted by UrbanBasis Robotics, was the development of methods for constructing an evolving model to assess the state of complex geographically distributed systems, taking into account the constantly occurring changes. It was decided to focus on the description of the dynamics of subject-object interaction at the micro level within the system as a key component of the concept of creating such a model. The concept of building the model includes a well-proven multi-agent approach. The paper provides a detailed overview of the trends in the use of multi-agents and their relevance for modeling the behavior of people and other mutually-influencing objects and processes. The principles for constructing models of changing the state of complex geographically distributed systems that take into account the dynamic properties of their constituent objects are formulated by the authors. The proposed method allows working with events of a measurable scale at the level of interactions between actors (subjects and objects) and their environment. The set of actors behavior models forms an integral model of the macro level. Software solutions for the implementation of this approach are structured in the form of a modular platform for multi-agent modeling of interactions in an urban environment. The practical result of this stage of research was the development of a client-server solution for modeling the states of complex systems in the tasks of analysis the movements and the interactions within an urbanized space. The OpenStreetMap online map data for a fragment of a real urban area is used as a template for the basis for movement. The simulation of the visualization is presented on the website of the live.urbanbasis.com project in the public domain.