Beyond the shortest-path: Towards cognitive occupancy modeling in BIM

Current approaches to simulate occupants' wayfinding in AEC mostly employ direct routing algorithms that assume global knowledge of the navigation environment to compute a shortest path between two locations. This simplification overlooks evidence concerning the role of perception and cognition during wayfinding in complex buildings, leading to potentially erroneous predictions that may hinder architects' ability to design wayfinding by architecture. To bridge this gap, we present a novel simulation paradigm entitled Cognitive Occupancy Modeling in BIM to simulate wayfinding by means of a vision-based cognitive agent and a semantically-enriched navigation space extracted from BIM (Building Information Modeling). To evaluate the predictive power of the proposed paradigm against human behavior, we conducted a wayfinding experiment in Virtual Reality (VR) with 149 participants, followed by a series of simulation experiments with cognitive and direct routing agents. Results highlight a significant correspondence between human participants' and cognitive agents' wayfinding behavior that was not observed with direct routing agents, demonstrating the potential of cognitive modeling to inform building performance simulations in AEC

cogARCH:Simulating Wayfinding by Architecture in Multilevel Buildings

Findings from cognitive science link the architectural complexity of multilevel buildings with occupants’ difficulty in orienting and finding their way. Nevertheless, current approaches to modelling occupants’ wayfinding reduce the representation of 3D multilevel buildings to isolated 2D graphs of each floor. These graphs do not take account of the interplay between agents’ 3D field of view and buildings’ 3D geometry, topology, or semantics, yet these are necessary to inform occupants’ path differentiation during wayfinding. Instead, agents are often modeled as unbounded and rational, able to calculate complete paths towards goals that are not immediately visible using direct routing algorithms. In turn, simulated behavior in most cases is unrealistically optimal (e.g. shortest or fastest route). This gap may hinder architects’ ability to foresee how their design decisions may result in suboptimal wayfinding behavior, whether intended or not. To bridge this gap, the paper presents cogARCH, a computational, agent-based simulation framework. cogARCH is grounded in research on spatial cognition and heuristic decision making to support pre-occupancy evaluation of wayfinding in multilevel buildings. To demonstrate the relevance of cogARCH to architectural design, we apply it to assess wayfinding performance across three architectural variations of a multilevel education building. Preliminary results showcase significant variability in cognitive agents’ wayfinding performance between building scenarios. In contrast, behavior of shortest-path agents sampled across respective conditions displayed significantly less variance and thus failed to reflect potential effects of architectural changes applied to 3D building configuration on wayfinding behavior

Beyond the Shortest-Path:Towards Cognitive Occupancy Modeling in BIM

Current approaches to simulate occupants' wayfinding in AEC mostly employ direct routing algorithms that assume global knowledge of the navigation environment to compute a shortest path between two locations. This simplification overlooks evidence concerning the role of perception and cognition during wayfinding in complex buildings, leading to potentially erroneous predictions that may hinder architects' ability to design wayfinding by architecture. To bridge this gap, we present a novel simulation paradigm entitled Cognitive Occupancy Modeling in BIM to simulate wayfinding by means of a vision-based cognitive agent and a semantically-enriched navigation space extracted from BIM (Building Information Modeling). To evaluate the predictive power of the proposed paradigm against human behavior, we conducted a wayfinding experiment in Virtual Reality (VR) with 149 participants, followed by a series of simulation experiments with cognitive and direct routing agents. Results highlight a significant correspondence between human participants' and cognitive agents' wayfinding behavior that was not observed with direct routing agents, demonstrating the potential of cognitive modeling to inform building performance simulations in AEC

Beyond the shortest-path: Towards cognitive occupancy modeling in BIM

Current approaches to simulate occupants' wayfinding in AEC mostly employ direct routing algorithms that assume global knowledge of the navigation environment to compute a shortest path between two locations. This simplification overlooks evidence concerning the role of perception and cognition during wayfinding in complex buildings, leading to potentially erroneous predictions that may hinder architects' ability to design wayfinding by architecture. To bridge this gap, we present a novel simulation paradigm entitled Cognitive Occupancy Modeling in BIM to simulate wayfinding by means of a vision-based cognitive agent and a semantically-enriched navigation space extracted from BIM (Building Information Modeling). To evaluate the predictive power of the proposed paradigm against human behavior, we conducted a wayfinding experiment in Virtual Reality (VR) with 149 participants, followed by a series of simulation experiments with cognitive and direct routing agents. Results highlight a significant correspondence between human participants' and cognitive agents' wayfinding behavior that was not observed with direct routing agents, demonstrating the potential of cognitive modeling to inform building performance simulations in AEC.ISSN:0926-580

Future Cities—City Futures: Emerging Urban Perspectives

The book is about future cities and possible scenarios for city futures. A question central to this book is how to face urban challenges while providing and safeguarding positive outcomes, concerned with the improvement of the quality of urban life: How can future cities be made more liveable, sustainable, and resilient? How can cities continue to provide a wide range of opportunities for all necessities of life? To tackle these complex questions, the book includes a collection of 25 articles written by 37 emerging voices in urban design and research. Together, they contribute from a diverse spectrum of interest, expertise, academic disciplines, and practice. They approach the built environment from a socio-cultural, respectively socio-economic perspective, from the viewpoint of urban policy and public health, with environmental concerns for urban sustainability and circularity in mind, and through the lens of urban computer and data science, providing a take on urban digitalization and transformation of cities into ‘smart’ cities. Together, their contributions reflect the complexity and diversity of challenges and opportunities underpinning future cities. Future Cities—City Futures intends to be a platform for trans-disciplinary urban discourse

Future Cities—City Futures: Emerging Urban Perspectives

The book is about future cities and possible scenarios for city futures. A question central to this book is how to face urban challenges while providing and safeguarding positive outcomes, concerned with the improvement of the quality of urban life: How can future cities be made more liveable, sustainable, and resilient? How can cities continue to provide a wide range of opportunities for all necessities of life? To tackle these complex questions, the book includes a collection of 25 articles written by 37 emerging voices in urban design and research. Together, they contribute from a diverse spectrum of interest, expertise, academic disciplines, and practice. They approach the built environment from a socio-cultural, respectively socio-economic perspective, from the viewpoint of urban policy and public health, with environmental concerns for urban sustainability and circularity in mind, and through the lens of urban computer and data science, providing a take on urban digitalization and transformation of cities into ‘smart’ cities. Together, their contributions reflect the complexity and diversity of challenges and opportunities underpinning future cities. Future Cities—City Futures intends to be a platform for trans-disciplinary urban discourse