Visualising Agent Movements with GeoTime

I've recently started using GeoTime (r), produced by Oculus who were kind enough to kind enough to provide a student license. I think the software is intended for the police but it works very well for visualising any type of movement in a space. It's particularly good for analysing the movements of agents. It provides plug-ins for Excel and ArcGIS so it's easy to send model results to GeoTime and then visualise them.

These screen shots* show a burglar agent who is searching for a potential victim. The horizontal axis is used to show movement in space and the vertical axis shows movement over time. You can use Arc to project a map on the spatial plane. The bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to restrict the events to a particular temporal range and it can be dragged to show how movements vary dynamically (will try to make a video of this).






The software is particularly useful for debugging and validation. You can look at the behaviour of the agents very carefully and see if they are behaving as they should. For example, the agent above walked up and down the same street about 10 times. This is probably not accurate and shows that work is needed on the behaviour of the agents to bring it in to line with criminology theory.

You can also use the software to visualise multiple agents. This will be particularly useful when agents can interact because it is easy to see where groups of agents cluster spatially and temporally.



*GeoTime® software used courtesy of Oculus Info Inc. All GeoTime rights reserved.