Qualitative spatial representation in agent-based models

Abstract

One of the advantages of agent-based models as simulations of social systems is the ease with which it is possible to spatially embed the agents and their interactions. Spatially explicit representations in agent-based models most typically take the form of raster-based representations in which the space is represented as a grid of squares. More recently, vectorbased representations have been used, usually importing data for the polygons from geographical information systems (GIS). However, for some models, what matters about the space for the purposes of simulation is less the quantitative spatial relationships among entities (e.g. area, distance or direction) than the qualitative relations these quantitative data are used to determine: neighbourhood, and accessibility (which is a general term covering movement and sensing from one region to another). This paper gives consideration to the use of qualitative spatial representations in agent-based modelling, using a model of everyday pro-environmental behaviour in the workplace as an example.