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Walking, Joint

Agents are situated in some environment and capable of autonomous action.

 Participatory Planning and GIS

Historical Background

Wavelets  Biomedical Data Mining, Spatial

Wayfinding: Affordances and Agent Simulation M ARTIN R AUBAL Department of Geography, University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Synonyms Wayfinding behavior; Affordance; Agent simulation; Environmental communication; Cognitive psychology; Multi agent systems Definition Wayfinding behavior is the purposeful, directed, and motivated movement from an origin to a specific distant destination that cannot be directly perceived by the traveler. It involves interaction between the wayfinder and the environment. Affordances are a concept from ecological psychology based on the paradigm of direct perception. They are specific combinations of the properties of substances and surfaces taken with reference to an observer. These invariant compounds are specified in ambient light—which is the result of illumination—and detected as units. Ambient light has structure and therefore information. Agent simulation is a technique of imitating the behavior of some situation or process involving one or many agents. An agent is anything that can perceive its environment through sensors and act upon it through effectors.

Kevin Lynch’s [1] “The Image of the City” is the first documentation of human wayfinding research in the literature. His goal was to develop a method for the evaluation of city form based on the concept of imageability, and to offer principles for city design. As part of the interviews people had to perform mental trips across their cities, describing the sequence of things and landmarks they would see along the way. Based on his investigations Lynch divided the contents of the city images into five classes: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. These elements were described as the building blocks in the process of making firm, differentiated structures at the urban scale and have been the basis for later wayfinding research. The term affordance was originally introduced by James J. Gibson who investigated how people visually perceive their environment [2]. Affordances belong to the ecological approach to psychology, which was developed to solve the major problem of cognitive psychology—the problem of knowledge. It is based on ecological science, a multidisciplinary advance to the study of living systems, their environments, and the reciprocity between the two. Agent simulation is a part of the larger area of computer simulation, which was developed in parallel with the rapid growth of computers starting with the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. There, the process of nuclear detonation was simulated using a Monte Carlo algorithm. The term agent has become popular in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Scientific Fundamentals Wayfinding Research in human wayfinding investigates the processes that take place when people orient themselves and navigate through space. Theories explain how people find their way