Agent-Based Modeling; a Paradigm to Deal with Complexity and Uncertainty in Architectural and Environmental Problems

Attempts to describe what designers do by thinking of designing as a process, has its roots in systems theory. Many of design problems are made-up of heterogeneous elements, when interacting with each other; produce emergent properties, persistence over time, and adapting to changing circumstances. Hence, designers and planners have been widely paying attention to computational thinking. Despite the recent success of computational modeling and simulation methods, many of them remain incapable of illustrating the emergence phenomenon, highlighting interactions between heterogeneous agents and confronting distributed phenomena over time. Therefor in recent years, designers have shifted their focus into agent-based modeling paradigms in order to explain how to deal with such issues and to look at many potential results as options and future predictions. The aim of this paper is to review agent-based modeling, exploring the main applications in architecture and to investigate research gaps. For this purpose 203 related articles during the period from 2001 to 2016 had been surveyed, the following articles were grouped because of their common themes, Then each group explained to provide a better understanding of the prospects ahead for further studies on this modeling paradigm. Examination of the main lines of thought in its applications also indicates that collaborative design is no longer of interest to designers and robots are new and emerging area in this fields.