POPSIM: A Platform Targeting the Modeling and Simulation of Human Populations in Urban Environments

In this paper we describe a simulation platform, POPSIM, targeting the modeling and simulation of human popula-tions in urban environments. POPSIM employs an agent-based modeling approach where individuals are intuitively represented by autonomous agents in the simulated popula-tion. Our efforts thus far have resulted in a prototype plat-form that embeds the following core functionality: a pop-ulation synthesizer responsible for generating agent specific characteristics using demographic, geographic and relation-ship statistics; an extensible routine behavior model that use activity statistics to generate agent plans representing daily activities such as working, eating, leisure, sleeping; a growing set of critical city infrastructure models represent-ing buildings, road-networks and cell-phone networks; and finally, a growing set of modular and reusable agent services such as activity planning and execution, field-of-view esti-mation, path-planning, opinion dynamics, etc