gSpaces: a meta-model for simulating agent mobility in urban or architectonic designs

Abstract

gSpaces is a meta-model based in a DEVs formalism combining a full description of space, time and states with a discrete treatment of mobile agent to mobile agent and mobile agent to environment interactions. We called a metamodel a sort of template which can be instantiated into different, particular models of urban or architectonic designs. Mobile agents dynamics are modeled on a discrete level dividing the space into cells and the updating mobile agents speed by a movement function particular to each space. The movement function can be designed in order to distinguish different kinds of mobile agents in the system. The initial spatial characteristics of the designed space can be imported from a Drawing Interchange Format (DXF) ASCII file using a toolkit developed for gSpaces. During the execution of a model, the gSpaces meta-model allows for these spatial features to change, at run-time, to simulate the consequences of a catastrophic event.