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Virtual City Simulator for Education, Training, and Guidance

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Monitoring, Security, and Rescue Techniques in Multiagent Systems

Part of the book series: Advances in Soft Computing ((AINSC,volume 28))

33.5 Conclusion

We presented two examples of crisis management applications of our virtual city simulator, FreeWalk. The first application is virtual evacuation simulation, where learners can observe multi-agent crowed behavior simulations described in the Q language and also take part in the simulation as avatars. The second application is transcendent guidance systems, which visualize real-world pedestrians in the virtual city and enable location-based remote guidance. The key feature of our simulator is such inclusion of humans in crowd behavior simulations of urban spaces. In the simulations, each person can be simulated as an agent, an avatar, or a projective agent that visualizes context information retrieved from a real-world person walking around a smart environment.

The development of the two applications showed that the design principles of real-world systems could be derived from virtual simulations. We designed the transcendent guidance system based on the result of the evacuation simulation experiment. The transfer of the design principles was made possible by the correspondence between the different viewpoints (first-person and bird’s-eye views) and the two different kinds of users (transcendent and immanent users). We think this study implies a new method of software design.

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Nakanishi, H. (2005). Virtual City Simulator for Education, Training, and Guidance. In: Monitoring, Security, and Rescue Techniques in Multiagent Systems. Advances in Soft Computing, vol 28. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32370-8_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-32370-8_33

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23245-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32370-9

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