GENESIS Web 2.0 Agent City Simulation: Establishing a user community and enabling collaborators to manipulate simulations and develop models Andy Turner eSI Workshop: The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on Various Applications Edinburgh, UK,

Outline Introduction GENESIS Modelling Specifying Agents in GENESIS User control of Agents in GENESIS Web 2.0 –Encouraging users –Open development Issues and Feedback

Introduction 1/7 Presentation slides available via my blog for this meeting Andy Turner – –Research scientist Based at the University of Leeds Specialising in e-Science and Computational Geography –Blogging what work I do as I do it

Introduction 2/7 SIM-UK –Origins in March 2005 –Group organisation Andy Turner's SIM-UK Web Page –Collaborative project Andy Turner's SIM-UK Project Web Page –Generating funding proposal phase...

Introduction 3/7 GENESIS – –Generative e-Social Science for Socio-Spatial Simulation –A second phase research node of the UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) –Funded by UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) –Development of Social Simulation models

Introduction 4/7 NeISS – –National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation –Funded by UK Joint Information Systems Committee(JISC) Information Environment Programme project –To build a generic production quality social simulation e-Infrastructure covering the social simulation lifecycle –Provision of e-Infrastructure that can allow others to develop and use Social Simulation models

Introduction 5/7 Geographic Agent Based Modelling –Geographic About interaction on or near the surface of earth Space-time-attribute It is about people and their environment –Agent Based Modelling Distinguishes an Environment and Agents that operate within it

Introduction 6/7 –Environment Provides the overall spatial and temporal extent and detail Has distributed attributes which are seeded and then developed as a result of agent interaction –Agents Individual entities that may interact both with other agents and with the Environment

Introduction 7/7 –Digital demographic representation of a person –General characteristics Date of birth Location Memory Current activity Scheduled activites –Default behaviours Individual Human Agents –Special characteristics –Residential locations –Preferences –...

GENESIS modelling 1/2 Demographic/Migration model –Daily time step –Birth –Death –Migration type person movements Traffic/Transportation model –Second time step –Initial focus on travel to work Incorporate travel to school Incorporate other journeys

GENESIS modelling 2/2 Major issues –Visualisation For development and for communicating model results –Constraining movement –Parallelisation –Data handling

Specifying Agents in GENESIS 1/2 Crux: Basic idea –To get a model running based on available data as an initial estimate of peoples movements Allow users to specify Agents movements in the models and modify and detail the movements in the simulation to reflect what people do/did in reality

Specifying Agents in GENESIS 2/2 Initial seeding the Traffic/Transport model –2001 UK Census data for commuting –National Pupil Database (NPD) Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) –Other survey data and transportation models that suggest levels of movement

User control of Agents in GENESIS Issues and concerns –What interface? –Security and trust –How to plug in? –Better to focus on getting input from commercial organisation data? Travel card (e.g. TFL Oyster) Mobile phone networks Credit card companies

Web 2.0 Getting users and Open Development What carrot? –Why should users want the application? A game? Some useful function like meeting or avoiding people Need for –Quality –Responsive development Open source to open development

Issues and Feedback Starting the main Web 2.0 work –What to start with? Considering developing an Open Social Application – –Target users of popular social networking tools and travel management tools Any questions/comments? –

Thanks and Acknowledgements eResearch community –NCeSS University of Leeds –School of Geography –Centre for Computational Geography EC/ESRC/JISC Organisers You