Modeling social and spatial behavior in built environments: Current methods and future directions

TY - CHAP

T1 - Modeling social and spatial behavior in built environments

T2 - Current methods and future directions

AU - Schaumann, Davide

AU - Kapadia, Mubbasir

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Inc.

PY - 2019/3/29

Y1 - 2019/3/29

N2 - One of the most important challenges for designing settings that better support people's well-being, productivity, and satisfaction is to predict and analyze the mutual relationship between a built environment and its human inhabitants, prior to an environment's construction and occupancy. This is indeed a complex task: human behavior is affected by the physical qualities of a space (e.g. a building geometry), the goals a person needs to attain (e.g. find the departure area in an airport or receiving medical care in a hospital), and the presence and behavior of other people, who may pursue similar or different goals in the same space. Different methods and practices enable the analysis of human social and spatial behavior in built environments. While multi-agent systems (MAS) hold potential to describe dynamic building-user interactions, several challenges must still be addressed to represent holistic scenarios of buildings in use, which involve collaborative behaviors, scheduled and unscheduled activities, and dynamic adaptations to spatial and social conditions. To address these issues, we describe recent advancements and key areas for improvement with respect to modeling spaces, the actors that populate it, the activities they undertake, and behavior-authoring frameworks for directing structured, collaborative activities of multiple actors in a given space. We also discuss future directions to improve human behavior simulation methods and apply them as decision support systems in architectural design and facility management.

AB - One of the most important challenges for designing settings that better support people's well-being, productivity, and satisfaction is to predict and analyze the mutual relationship between a built environment and its human inhabitants, prior to an environment's construction and occupancy. This is indeed a complex task: human behavior is affected by the physical qualities of a space (e.g. a building geometry), the goals a person needs to attain (e.g. find the departure area in an airport or receiving medical care in a hospital), and the presence and behavior of other people, who may pursue similar or different goals in the same space. Different methods and practices enable the analysis of human social and spatial behavior in built environments. While multi-agent systems (MAS) hold potential to describe dynamic building-user interactions, several challenges must still be addressed to represent holistic scenarios of buildings in use, which involve collaborative behaviors, scheduled and unscheduled activities, and dynamic adaptations to spatial and social conditions. To address these issues, we describe recent advancements and key areas for improvement with respect to modeling spaces, the actors that populate it, the activities they undertake, and behavior-authoring frameworks for directing structured, collaborative activities of multiple actors in a given space. We also discuss future directions to improve human behavior simulation methods and apply them as decision support systems in architectural design and facility management.

KW - Flow-based models

KW - Human-environment interactions

KW - Modeling principles

KW - Multi-agent systems

KW - Particle-based models

KW - Process-based models

KW - Social behavior

KW - Spatial behavior

KW - System dynamics

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85082454308

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85082454308#tab=citedBy

U2 - 10.1002/9781119485001.ch29

DO - 10.1002/9781119485001.ch29

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781119484967

SP - 673

EP - 695

BT - Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

PB - wiley

ER -