Understanding the role of agents in virtual cities
The idea behind the Information Cities (ICITIES) project was to apply knowledge of how real cities evolve over time and how their inhabitants interact to their virtual counterparts. The project participants included universities, research institutes as well as industry representatives. Support was provided by the EU's Information Society Technologies Programme. ICITIES researchers with the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) helped develop a large-scale agent-based simulation environment. Virtual cities of the future will no doubt rely heavily on software programs that will carry out tasks on behalf of users. ICITIES developed infrastructure capable of testing a wide range of such software agents simultaneously. A specification mechanism made it possible to configure and run multiple models at the same time, including different configurations of the same model. Agent collections and landscape elements had to be defined for each individual model simulation. The ability to retrieve and reuse basic software components from a dedicated library helped the design phase. Another key element of SICS' platform focused on managing the behaviour of the agents. Several so-called workers could be deployed, each assigned to a particular collection of agents. The computing power required to run the simulation environment was provided by clusters of workstations operating in parallel. Where possible, the user requirements with respect to programming skill were minimised. Finally, commercially available graphics packages have been recommended for visualisation of the simulation results.
