Representation of Interactions in a Multi-Level Multi-Agent Model for Cartography Constraint Solving

摘要

The objective of cartographic generalisation is to simplify geographic data in order to create legible maps when scale decreases. It often requires to reason at different levels of abstraction (e.g. a building, a city). To automate this process, Multi-Agent approaches have been used for several years. Map objects (e.g. buildings) are modelled as autonomous entities that try to solve constraints through appropriate transformations. Yet, those approaches are not able to deal with all situations that appear between cartographic objects in a map. Indeed, though a map intrinsically involves objects that belong to several description, scale or organisation levels, there is no explicit multi-level representation in agent-based cartographic models. Thus we assume that the use of a multi-level multi-agent model would improve the automated generalisation process. Especially, the PADAWAN model is a multi-agent model offering multi-level capabilities which meet quite well the requirements for the multi-level organisation of cartographic objects. In this paper, we expose how we use this model on the one hand, to reify multi-level relations between cartographic agents, and on the other hand, to represent the constraints and the actions proposed to solve them, as interactions between the agents.