Modelling

Urban Dynamics as Complex Systems

Universidad de Huelva. Department of Information Technology

Gonzalo A. Aranda-Corral Joaqun Borrego-Daz

Alejandro Blanco-Escudero
Yaco Sistemas, S.L.

Manuel Gomar-Acosta
Elelog S.L.

Universidad de Sevilla. Department of Computer Sciences and Articial Intelligence

Contemporary ci.es are, in essence, Complex Systems (CS) extremely interes.ng to inves.gate. A key feature is that Urban Environments provide big databases which are useful to analyze and to understand par.al views of their own structure and dynamics. This represents an emergent research eld where the genera.on and use of physical and digital informa.on from ci.es is applied to design new applica.ons, services and urban plans, as well as, to analysis social behaviors in ci.es. This eld is mul.disciplinary, in nature, where Computer Science, Urban Studies, e- Government, media studies, Open Data strategies and Web Services play important roles. Digital informa.on about ci.es have dierent reliability. Current ini.a.ves based on OpenData (e.g. ParisData, hMp:// opendata.paris.fr/) aim to process this informa.on, hoping to build useful mashups for ci.es.

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The aim of this work is to describe our experience

needed to simulate urban phenomenas, specically urban catastrophes, and it is based on every modern city has a digital mirror where researches can access to informa.on (and knowledge) about the city. The analysis have been developed into the context of "eCompleXcity project". One goal of this project is to study Complex Systems associated to Urban Informa.cs and Compu.ng. We are interested in simula.ng urban processes by means of Mul.agent Systems (MAS). MAS point of view of CS is quite natural because it considers that each module/node of system is an agent. From the Agent point of view, we can formally dene its own behavior, as well as, its interac.on with other agents. CS can evolve along .me and new proper.es and behaviors emerge. Powerful tools to design CS in a high abstrac.on level are available. These tools also let us to create big scalable simula.ons(experiments) and this means a key point for MAS.

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Our framework has been applied to a case study: simula.on of ooding caused by Katrina's hurricane in New Orleans.
Supported by TIC-6064 ("eCompleXcity" Emergent Concepts in Complex Systems. ApplicaBons to Urban InformaBcs and Cultural Complexity -Junta de Andaluca) and TIN2009-09492 (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin and FEDER).