Intertwining agents and environments

Connections between human agents and dynamic natural and physical environments can be difficult to explore, particularly for critical scenarios in which evidence is often scarce. For these scenarios, we often turn to modeling and simulation as sandboxes for our inquiry. However, in the absence of fine-grain ground truth about events and phenomena that are often extraordinary in the human experience, our models have settled upon a tradition of coarse representation. In this paper, we introduce a method for developing rich connections between agents and environment. We present a scheme for Virtual Geographic Environments, which puts them to use as a platform for intertwining diverse spatial data from Geographic Information Systems, three-dimensional mesh models of built settings, agent-based models of human cognition and movement, and richly specified process models for physical phenomena and human behavior. To demonstrate the usefulness of the scheme, we will present a unified model of human–physical response to built damage following a simulated earthquake.