Projects

This research theme, within the framework of the COMECA project (CO‑creation of Innovative Forest Resources Management Combining Indigenous Knowledge and Ecological Methods), introduces a new approach to the design of cognitive agents that integrate spatial representation and reasoning into agent‑based modeling dedicated to land‑use simulations. The deep motivation behind our agent‑centered contribution lies in the growing development of spatially explicit agent‑based simulation platforms. We build upon this technological evolution and topology theory to endow agents with human‑like spatial representation and reasoning capacities, following a Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) architecture.

A pilot implementation of the methodology, including simulation experiments on a hunting model, was carried out in the GAMA platform to assess agent performance. The simulations reveal a consistent trend in animal population dynamics and also confirm the model’s high sensitivity to the integration of spatial knowledge and reasoning in agent‑based models of human actors. These results demonstrate the successful implementation and highlight the importance of the spatial dimension in the expressive power and validity of agent‑based models.

Future research should therefore focus on designing representations of human knowledge and incorporating learning capabilities to improve model efficiency.