ESRI/Argonne National Laboratory/University of Michigan, August 2004 - August 2005

Traditionally, the analytical and computational tools used by geographers poorly represent time. It is often the tools from this community that are used in the spatial modelling of land use and land cover change. In an effort to improve the ability to represent temporal processes associated with spatial data models and link geographic data and spatial processes to agent-based models this project sought to design a tool, called Agent Analyst.

My role in the project was to provide theoretical, technical, and design input as well as debug prototypes, implement sample models, and contribute to papers. From these efforts I presented at two conferences and coauthored a conference proceeding and refereed journal. The conference proceeding compared a number of different ABM platforms and their ability to represent geographic data and processes (Rand et al. 2005). The results illustrated the degree to which each toolkit was useful for novice modellers and that none of the available toolkits provided a useful integration of GIS and ABM. The journal publication was more theoretical and used examples to describe the types of linkages between ABM and GIS and their associated advantages and disadvantages (Brown et al. 2005).

An ESRI Press book is due to come out on using Agent Analyst with ArcGIS. I have lead a chapter in this book.