Domenico Camarda

Visualizing space-based interactions among distributed agents: environmental planning at the inner-city scale

Since from the 1980s, computer science and artificial intelligence have focused on environmental planning, with high interest in analysing real and virtual cognitive agents at work. This is true for procedures, long-range planning, operational planning, as well as factors and scenarios of future events, future risks, multi-agent organisation, and resource-based planning. This long-range, large-scale, strategy-driven interest has generally prevented short-term planning, low-scale and detailed planning from being explored with an intelligent-planning approach. This paper shows a case of small-scale inner-city planning for environmental and development issues in an urban context, with a sustainably sound approach. In this concern, a system architecture has been set up, to support the interaction of local social, economic, financial agents by a web-based geographic interface able to visualize, share, channel substantial information in the planning process with a space-based approach. The details of setup methodologies and results are analyzed, trying to find potentials and critical characters of a georeferenced cooperative work, particularly attentive to the role of space-based cognitions and discourses in multi-agent interactions.

Mobility in environmental planning: an integrated multi-agent approach

Mobility infrastructure planning is an increasingly crucial aspect of environmental planning, essential to boost regional economies and social relations, as well as critical for environmental impacts involved. Structuring inherently complex issues and problems is a major challenge of mobility planning. Today, therefore, a major issue is the setting up of system architectures that take into account the impacts of the mobility system on environmental and social quality. A multi-agent approach is seen as useful to let local stakeholders interact, meanwhile learning from each others’ attitudes and cognitions. The present paper deals with the building up of an IT-based multi-agent platform in public interaction forums, particularly envisioning alternative mobility scenarios in the plan of the Italian province of Foggia.

Planning for the environmental quality of urba microclimate: a multiagent-based approach

An increasing concern about urban environmental quality has grown in the last decades caused by urban production mechanisms. Now, policies and ICT models need to integrate traditional quantitative techniques with more complex multiagent tools to support effective recovery strategies. Basing on a hybrid scenario approach, the present research links information and knowledge aspects to define sequences of events and processes for decisionmaking. An ICT-based model is set up, involving human agents, lowprofile artificial (routinary) agents and/or high profile (intelligent) agents, as defined by computer-science and multi-agent studies. Particularly, the paper focuses on the case study of Bari, Italy, addressing multi-agent-based relationships between urban microclimatic and social characters.

Multi-agent Environmental Planning: A Forum-based Case Study in Italy 1

Social systems evolve dynamically in any environmental domain, either regions or neighbourhoods, with cooperation—but also with conflict—among multiple agents and cultures. New plans aim at building discourses and visions related to evolving situations where stakeholders locate their behaviours, meanwhile learning about themselves and surrounding environments. Expert and non-expert agents accessing forums belong to specific social contexts, which are only partially explorable because of incomplete information available. Therefore, a crucial role is played by communication architectures, able to support the exchange of the knowledge of the agents. Therefore, a new multi-knowledge and multi-agent feature affects planning processes—and the present paper explores such subjects, with reference to the structural plan of a province in southern Italy. In this planning process, public forums are used to build future environmental scenarios. Attention to strategic planning (SP) is well rooted in social science studies. Since the 1980s, computer science and artificial intelligence—and cognitive science at large—have focused on the possible applications of their own methods to SP. This is due to the peculiar aspect of SP, which seems highly interesting when dealing with cognitive agents at work in social domains. Cognitive agents Abstract Social systems evolve dynamically in any environmental domain, either regions or neighbourhoods, with cooperation—but also with conflict—among multiple agents and cultures. New plans aim at building discourses and visions related to evolving situations where stakeholders locate their behaviours, meanwhile learning about themselves and surrounding environments. Expert and non-expert agents accessing forums belong to specific social contexts, which are only partially explorable because of incomplete information available. Therefore, a crucial role is played by communication architectures, able to support the exchange of the knowledge of the agents. Therefore, a new multi-knowledge and multi-agent feature affects planning processes, and the paper explores such subjects, with reference to the structural plan of a province in southern Italy. In this planning process public forums are used to build future environmental scenarios.

Cooperative Scenario Building in Environmental Planning: Agents, Roles, Architectures

The new complexity of planning knowledge implies innovation of planning methods, in both substance and procedure. In this concern, an increasing number of experiences on multi-agent interactions is today located within processes of spatial and environmental planning. Case studies have not been deliberately set up using formalized and/or predefined multi-agent-system layouts. Therefore, a multi-agent approach and supporting system (MAS) emerged in a bottom-up fashion, driven by the needs demanded by the activities carried out. However, such approaches have not been formalized properly to date. The present paper aims at scanning experiences on the setting up of cooperative multi-agent systems, in order to investigate the potentials of that approach on the interaction of the agents in planning processes.

Memory and creativity in cooperative vs. non-cooperative spatial planning and architecture

Meanings and roles of memories and creativity in spatial organizations are raising increasing attention among scholars and professionals. Creativity in cognition-oriented spatial studies is gradually seen as a normal feature of an organization. This thesis is supported, e.g., by the evidences on the role of memory in the most creative parts of the activity of architects, combined with exceptional association abilities representing the real bulk of creativity. The present paper addresses the discussion of such issues, by analysing case studies of single-agent and multi-agent spatial organization under two levels of spatial navigation and space design. The paper explores possible modelling approaches and system architectures supporting cognition-oriented activities in spatial organizations.

Knowledge of Places: An Ontological Analysis of the Social Level in the City

The present paper proposes to enrich standard methodologies to interpret places with information coming from other forms of place interpretation and description. We develop this proposal investigating geographical places since these are complex spatial environments well suited for the exploitation of different paradigms. The new approach we explore is based on ontological analysis. This approach, we believe, is very useful to integrate a cognitive stand within the traditional analytical and organizational views of complex spatial environments, in particular aiming to facilitate decision-making processes. The overall rationale of this paper is twofold. From the one hand, the introduction of ontological levels is rather useful for organizing the modeling of complex systems. On the other hand, while these levels are informative, our understanding of space cannot be reduced to the ontological elements per se since they lack the contextual perspective. Therefore, deeper studies and research are needed to develop formal frameworks that can completely integrate standard and ontological methodologies for general modeling purposes.

Knowledge of Places: An Ontological Analysis of the Social Level in the City.

The present paper proposes to enrich standard methodologies to interpret places with new information coming from other forms of place interpretation and description. We develop this proposal investigating geographical places since these are complex spatial environments well suited for the exploitation of different paradigms. The new approach we explore is based on ontological analysis. This approach, we believe, is very useful to integrate a cognitive stand within the traditional analytical and organizational views of complex spatial environments, in particular aiming to facilitate decision-making processes.

The Effect of Rotation in the Navigation of Multi-level Buildings: A Pilot Study

The aim of the present paper is to investigate user’s perception of buildings’ layouts with particular emphasis on navigation of multi-level buildings. Up to date, research seems to pay more attention to wayfinding in two-dimensional environments, investigating it in public buildings such as hospitals, airports or university departments where it is more common to experience disorientation. The present work deepens this issue and focuses on the effect of rotation – due to staircases – on people’s cognitive maps. The study consists of a pilot work based on two cases: one qualitative, conducted at the University of Bremen, and the other one quantitative, conducted at the Technical University of Bari. Main results suggests that staircases affect somehow people’s perception of layout during navigation of multi-level buildings.

Learning and Sharing Technology in Informal Contexts. A Multiagent-Based Ontological Approach

An increasing debate is growing today, in both academic and research-in-action contexts, about the roles of new and traditional technologies in raising knowledge of agents involved, as well as in boosting an effective development of communities. The last century has been largely dominated by capital-intensive technologies, impacting large and populated areas. From the late 1990s up to the present days, due to social, financial, environmental concerns, new low-impact, local-born, little to medium-scale experiences have been challenging large technologies, with interesting results. The importance of such experiences seems to lay on the abilities and knowledge of local populations, which are quite difficult to emerge as formal methodologies and attain recognizable levels of generalization and sharing. Yet the effectiveness of local-based technologies is being increasingly documented, often succeeding in cases where more formal technologies had previously failed. The EU-funded ANTINOMOS project has largely dealt with local-community knowledge enhancing and managing in the water sector management, aiming at creating a real learning environment for the sharing and the active generation of knowledge through mutual synergies. In this paper, the above subject is discussed and carried out with a cross-disciplinary, cross-scale, multi-agent approach, considering the different forms of local knowledge and language involved.