Modeling Social and Spatial Behavior in Built Environments: Current Methods and Future Directions

Summary One of the most important challenges for designing settings that better support people's well-being, productivity, and satisfaction is to predict and analyze the mutual relationship between a built environment and its human inhabitants, prior to an environment's construction and occupancy. This is indeed a complex task: human behavior is affected by the physical qualities of a space (e.g. a building geometry), the goals a person needs to attain (e.g. find the departure area in an airport or receiving medical care in a hospital), and the presence and behavior of other people, who may pursue similar or different goals in the same space. Different methods and practices enable the analysis of human social and spatial behavior in built environments. While multi-agent systems (MAS) hold potential to describe dynamic building–user interactions, several challenges must still be addressed to represent holistic scenarios of buildings in use, which involve collaborative behaviors, scheduled and unscheduled activities, and dynamic adaptations to spatial and social conditions. To address these issues, we describe recent advancements and key areas for improvement with respect to modeling spaces, the actors that populate it, the activities they undertake, and behavior-authoring frameworks for directing structured, collaborative activities of multiple actors in a given space. We also discuss future directions to improve human behavior simulation methods and apply them as decision support systems in architectural design and facility management.