design modelling symposium berlin 2019 … simulating and predicting office occupation patterns

Agent-based Semiology for Simulation and Prediction of Contemporary Spatial Occupation Patterns,a paper that I had the pleasure to co-author with Mathias Fuchs, is our contribution to this year’s Design Modelling Symposium Berlin titled Impact: Design With All Senses. The conference proceedings have been published by Springer International Publishing and can be accessed here.

Follow this link to read this paper on my research blog parametricsemiology.com.

Agent-based Semiology for Simulation and Prediction of Contemporary Spatial Occupation Patters

Mathias Fuchs (London) and Robert R. Neumayr (Vienna), 2019.

Abstract: Agent-based semiology is a powerful simulation and prediction environment for pedestrian simulation that allows for accurate balancing of complexity. Here, we describe a framework to simulate increasing behavioural interactivity between agents via agent-based modeling, together with a statistical approach to make the results amenable to a quantitative and automated analysis. That approach borrows ideas from crowd simulation and spatial statistics, notably fitting of Poisson processes, and computer graphics. The described process can simply be thought of as that of approaching an observed pattern by an overlay or additive mixture of grey-scale images each of which are distance transforms of physical objects. Thus, we describe the observed pattern in terms of interactions of spatial features which are akin to traditional BIM tags. We thus arrive at a remarkably concise prediction of the simulation outcome. The benefits of this simulation speedup is, on the one hand, to allow for higher optimization throughput, and on the other hand, to provide designers with quantitative feedback about the impact of their design on the simulation outcome.

Keywords: Parametric Modeling, Simulation, Agent-Based Semiology.