This chapter presents an innovative approach to the study of the journey to residential burglary. We demonstrate a simulation model that is built upon the integration of cellular automaton (CA) and multi-agent system (MAS). The model utilizes both social disorganization (SD) and routine activity (RA) theories to predict locations of residential burglary targets. The model simulates an offender as an intelligent agent of MAS that interacts with the target and place automata of CA. The likelihood of a residential burglary is modeled as a function of offender’s motivation, target desirability and place guardianship, which in turn are determined by the offender’s individual characteristics often used by RA and the target and place’s neighborhood properties frequently utilized in SD. The model was initialized and parameterized using “real” crime data from Dallas, Texas Police Department. Results under two different weighting scenarios were obtained and compared with the actual distribution of offense locations, revealing the flexibility of model in its capability to assessing the influence of the two theories in burglary crime simulation. In closing we propose possible modifications that could be made to the model in the future.
Spatial simulation models of seed dispersal have been constructed at the landscape level under the assumption of ubiquitous or uniform dispersibility. The anisotropic nature of vegetation distribution caused by different dispersal agents such as wind, gravity, water and animals were ignored. We propose a prototype of a GIS-based spatially explicit model of dispersal agent behavior (SEMODAR) to simulate the seed dispersal process by considering the unique behavioral characteristics of each seed dispersal agent. As a result, the influence of dispersal agent behavior on the species coexistence in competitive communities with and without habitat destruction could be explored. The model consists of four module components: dispersal rules, species competition, species colonization, and habitat destruction. An experimental simulation was conducted using three hypothetical species with differing competitive and migration abilities in both intact and disturbed conditions for 250 years. The findings of this study support the theoretical expectation that inferior competitors can coexist with superior competitors given that the inferior competitors have efficient colonization ability. The simulation also reveals the important role of agent behavior in the seed dispersal process and the biased impact of environment fragmentation on superior competitors that are not superior dispersers. #
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