Mobility in Environmental Planning: An Integrated Multi-agent Approach

The new complexity of planning knowledge implies innovation of planning methods, in both substance and procedure. The development of multi-agent cognitive processes, particularly when the agents are diverse and dynamically associated to their interaction arenas, may have manifold implications. In particular, interesting aspects are scale problems of distributed interaction, continuous feedback on problem setting, language and representation (formal, informal, hybrid, etc.) differences among agents (Bousquet, Le Page, 2004). In this concern, an increasing number of experiences on multi-agent interactions are today located within the processes of spatial and environmental planning. Yet, the upcoming presence of different human agents often acting au paire with artificial agents in a social physical environment (see, e.g., with sensors or data-mining routines) often suggests the use of hybrid MAS-based approaches (Al-Kodmany, 2002; Ron, 2005). In this framework, the chapter will scan experiences on the setting up of cooperative multi-agent systems, in order to investigate the potentials of that approach on the interaction of agents in planning processes, beyond participatory planning as such. This investigation will reflect on agent roles, behaviours, actions in planning processes themselves. Also, an attempt will be carried out to put down formal representation of supporting architectures for interaction and decision making.

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Spatial Ontologies in Multi-Agent Environmental Planning

Technologies for Supporting Reasoning Communities and Collaborative Decision Making ◽

10.4018/978-1-60960-091-4.ch015 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 272-295 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Dino Borri ◽

Domenico Camarda

Keyword(s):

Environmental Planning ◽

Spatial Behaviour ◽

Multi Agent Systems ◽

Dynamic Complexity ◽

Agent Systems ◽

Spatial Features ◽

Planning Effort ◽

Multi Agent ◽

Over Time ◽

Living Single

Landscapes and townscapes have been studied by many disciplinary areas over time. This study addresses the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of environmental spacescapes in planning by human agents. In fact, because of their dynamic complexity, environmental spacescapes create challengesfor the typical spatial behaviour of an agent perceiving and navigating in it. Therefore, environmental planning activities need to identify and manage the ‘fundamentals’ of spacescapes from the viewpoints of living single agents or multi-agent organizations, those to whom the planning effort is addressed. In this framework, the chapter deals with spatial ontologies in multi-agent systems. Some recent experiments are described and discussed here, highlighting spatial features of navigated environments from an environmental planning perspective.

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