Combining cellular automata and intelligent agents

These 2 papers (A Multi-Agent Cellular Automata Model of Pedestrian
Movement, PEDFLOW: Development of an Autonomous Agent Model of Pedestrian Flow) use a cellular automata system to model pedestrian traffic and overlay that with an intelligent agent system for when the pedestrians have options for where they can move. A cellular automata system is basically a set of rules that dictate for each pedestrian in the model what they should do in the next time step based on their current state. The state of a pedestrian is a combination of their location, individual characteristics of that pedestrian such as how much personal space they like to keep between themselves and others, and the portion of the outside world that that pedestrian can "see." We are going to try to use something like this in our model.

Presentation on Current Progress and Methodology

For the past two weeks, we have been finalizing our practical methodology and gathering data from the various areas of study as outlined in our proposal.  Today we presented some slides to Prof. Gibson that detail our progress thus far.  It also includes our methodology that has been revised from our work in the field and from consultation with Fabio Carerra and the rest of the VPC staff. Below is an example of some of the material presented, a map detailing the locations of the bridges that we have started to study.

The green circles are our highest priority bridges, the pink squares are the secondary bridges.

The full set of slides is available for download here.