Research

Research vision

My research is driven by scientific challenges in the area of social-urban complex systems. Complex Systems span a wide range of different application areas, but exhibit common systemic behaviours that emerge through the interactions of simple elements. This systemic behaviour can only be understood by holistic analysis that necessitates viewing the system as a dynamic collective of individuals. Traditional means of quantitative analysis are known to be insufficient to understand such systems. Through the complex systems approach social systems can be viewed as collections of autonomous agents that operate seemingly simple rules, but through their interaction may lead to unexpected or undesirable systemic effects. Computational models are one of the best means of analysis for reasoning about, and understanding, such emergent phenomena at scale. One of the most fundamental challenges in this area is how to map social technical and natural phenomena into scalable and predictive computational models that can help develop and test interventions.

In order to address this fundamental challenge my research aims to develop novel methods in agent-based modelling (modelling methodology) and discrete-event simulation (computation execution). This includes methods for semi-automatic model construction, modelling formalisms that are able to capture human behaviour and new ways to probe and measure social-urban systems to be able to validate and calibrate such models. My application areas include the growth of informal settlements, the process of school segregation through school choice, the dynamics of human crowds, and the social dynamics of EV charging behaviour.

PhD students

Postdocs

Service

Programme Committee: SIMUTOOLS, IEEE/ACM Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT), Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems AAMAS 2015, International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, MABS 12th International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation, IEEE/WIC/ACM Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), AsiaSim

Editor: Journal of Computational Science 2011-present, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS) 2015-2016, 2024-present

Awards

  • Best paper award at Euro-SIW 2003
  • Best paper Parallel and Distributed Simulation (PADS) conference 2006
  • Best paper AsiaSim 2013
  • Best Applied Paper Winter Simulation Conference 2022