Domenico Camarda

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnic University of Bari

The notion of Digital Twin (DT) gained attention about 15 years ago when sufficient computational capacities became available allowing to develop and run so-called virtual copies of a given physical product. As the evolution of so-called smart cities led to the integration of data-driven decision systems in the traditional urban infrastructure, DTs...

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly adopted as measures for enabling climate change mitigation and adaptation, for reducing flood risks and for enhancing urban ecosystems. However, several barriers hinder the implementation of NBS in urban areas, in planning activities and strategies. These include the inadequacy of some existing methods...

The concepts of green infrastructures, nature-based solutions and ecosystem services are today considered an integral part of the broader theme of the urban bioregion, with an intrinsic character of complexity. It is certainly difficult to structure bioregional processes in a balanced and sustainable way, able to keep local energy production and co...

In previous research stages we have reflected on how uncertainty and the unknown are elements that one can’t avoid dealing with during the territorial and environmental planning process. Our lives (in our individual and private choices) and our plans for a city or a territory have to cope with unexpected events, uncertainties, and often with unwant...

When building knowledge for planning and management activities, agents’ spatial cognition and interaction with urban spaces play critical roles. Wayfinding process is interactive by nature. Also, the recognition of places depends on the ability to remember them: the presence of significant elements helps easier and efficient memorization. Environme...

Floods are among the most frequent natural hazards, and flood risk management is a paramount task when planning solutions to reduce their impact on communities. In the last decades, policy makers' actions for flood risk management have been redirected from purely physical self-protective measures towards integrated management strategies by includin...

Due to the multiple dimensions of urban complexity, ontology-based multiagent models become widespread. These models seem to support complex relational and cognitive interactions in urban decision-making processes. In this context, simulations and experiments are today investigating ontologies applied to spatial planning, as a support in the real w...

Socio-technical systems (STS) described in literature today rely on multiple and different interaction patterns for their characterization. With the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) and formal interaction languages, the logical modeling of STS has improved. Yet these rich ongoing approaches require perspective changes and new features.

During a planning process for strategic anthropic decisions that will invest a territory, or an environmental system, or a city organization, we deal with many data, many results of very different analyses. In an abstract way we could represent this huge amount of results and data as the set of what we know, but beside this set at least an equivale...

In the field of spatial planning, the role of knowledge resulting from a cognitive bottom-up approach is increasing. In a “cognitive planning” approach the environment represents a biological and cultural expression of the relationship between population, activities and places. Yet defining an appropriate model to represent the different cognitive...

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities (and perhaps territories) points to relevant...

The management of issues related to water resources, a highly complex domain, has increasingly highlighted the critical role of knowledge towards shared, useful and effective planning decisions. Hydrology is an applied science with a very large theoretical base, its corpus borders with many others science domains. The clarification of theoretical,...

Social dimension is a fundamental part of sustainable spatial planning, design and management. Envisioning its requirements and consequences is of the utmost importance when implementing solutions. Decision Support Systems aim towards improving decision-making processes in the development of infrastructures and services. They assist decision makers...

Strategic planning has recently focused its attention on the elements that characterize the spaces through which the agents move, paying particular attention on the way in which they incorporate them. Spatial environments are currently studied from different perspectives, from the cognitivist point of view they represent knowledge-intensive, signif...

A Multi-Agent simulator made in Unity 3D is proposed to track the spread of Hospital Acquired Infections transmitted by contact in hospital wards. The tool generates a real-time contamination risk map for both people and spaces, depending on the profile, behavior and activities of virtual agents, the characteristics of pathogens and the role of ina...

Hospital-acquired infections (HAI) are recognized worldwide as a major threat to hospital users. In this study, we present the Multi-Agent modelling and simulation of HAI propagation dynamics through exogenous cross-infection by a contact transmission route in a hospital ward. The model relies on the Event Based Modelling and Simulation approach. I...

The present study provides a reflection on the agent-based intelligence of urban spatial environments through the comparison of a formal quantitative approach, i.e., space syntax, and a qualitative experimentation based on the spatial cognition approach. Until recently, space syntax was adopted by urban planners and designers to support urban desig...

The paper presents the design phase of an Agent-BasedModel of a human user acting in a built environment, useful for the simulation of indoor and outdoor settings in urban and architectural design. It describes a conceptual framework to formalize themain aspects of human spatial behavior in a shared environment. Moreover, it represents the cognitiv...

The concept of ecosystem services (ES) arises as a formal outcome of historical processes of understanding and interpreting settlements as complex ecological systems. Because of a straightforward, bottom-up demand for environment enhancement, this concept increasingly occurs in discourses, in narratives, in the demands of common people, triggering...

Spatial environments have been largely studied over time, under different perspectives. Under a cognitivist perspective, they represent knowledge-intensive, meaningful spaces and entities that human agents relate to and adapt during their existence. The comprehension/identification of space fundamentals by human agents can be of great interest in s...

The awareness about environmental complexity involves real-time knowledge and demands urban planning initiatives. Knowledge is multiform, multi-agent and mirrors environmental complexity. Problems characterizing urban sustainability particularly claim non-expert knowledge, being informal, puzzling, uncertain, incomplete, hard to be handled, formali...

The concept of ecosystem services arises as a formal outcome of historical processes of understanding and interpreting settlements as complex ecological systems. Because of a straightforward, bottom-up demand for environment enhancement, that concept increasingly occurs in discourses, in narratives, in the demands of common people, triggering a new...

La consapevolezza circa la complessità ambientale comporta iniziative di pianificazio-ne intrinsecamente connesse ad una real-time knowledge. Partendo dalle potenzialità della fuzzy logic nella trattazione dell'incertezza, questo studio utilizza le fuzzy cogniti-ve maps per esplorare tale complessità e supportare le decisioni multi-agente. L'analis...

In Italy, planning processes are often introduced by a Program of strategic objectives, drawn up in conjunction with the initial phases of a Strategic environmental assessment. This combination of preliminary processes offers significant space for strategic approaches and even strategic plans, particularly at the local level. This paper deals with...

The present paper proposes to enrich standard methodologies to interpret places with information coming from other forms of place interpretation and description. We develop this proposal investigating geographical places since these are complex spatial environments well suited for the exploitation of different paradigms. The new approach we explore...

Spatial behaviours often shape spacescapes, but because of dynamic complexity they are hard to be simulated in AI-based environments. Thus, degrees of uncertainty often emerge in describing spaces, when trying to give shared significance to structural, fundamental, peculiar spacescape qualities. This paper explores space ontologies built by human a...

Spacescapes are often shaped by spatial behaviour. However, their dynamic complexity makes it difficult for them to be simulated in AI-based environments. As a result, degrees of uncertainty often arise when one describes spaces, trying to give shared importance to structural, fundamental, peculiar spacescape qualities.

The present paper proposes to enrich standard methodologies to interpret places with new information coming from other forms of place interpretation and description. We develop this proposal investigating geographical places since these are complex spatial environments well suited for the exploitation of different paradigms. The new approach we exp...

The aim of the present paper is to investigate user’s perception of buildings’ layouts with particular emphasis on navigation of multi-level buildings. Up to date, research seems to pay more attention to wayfinding in two-dimensional environments, investigating it in public buildings such as hospitals, airports or university departments where it is...

Planning activities are inherently technical, political and organizational exercises, being both constructions of action optimization over time and "social" organizations promoting action. Thus, they require organization and consensus. In this context, the concept of processes that develop based on diffused interactions between different agents app...

Background The existence of the complexity in layout and physical parameters are still under investigation in urban architecture in cognitive science. Current research seems to pay more attention to wayfinding in two-dimensional environments investigating it in public buildings such as hospitals, airports or university departments, where it is more...

This paper presents the design phase of an agent-based model of a human user of urban space, simulating the urban-environment system through a multi-agent approach. Within the general aim to build a comprehensive multi-agent model for urban environments simulations focusing on human spatial behavior. A conceptual framework is proposed, which repres...

Debates on sustainable technologies for urban management—be they related to energy, water, transport, or any other major sectors—tend to be restricted to issues about how to support a transition to new and more efficient technologies, as part of a linear path of progress proceeding from old, backward technologies to modern ones. Technologies themse...

The inherently complex nature of the environmental domain requires that planning efforts become projects of participated, inclusive, multi-agent, multi-source knowledge building processes developed by the community. Knowledge is often hard to be processed, handled, formalized, modeled. Yet cognitive models are useful to avoid the typical unmanageab...

The preservation of the environment is today a dynamic process of multi-agent knowledge building. In this process, the perception and the complex representation of the environment and the evolution of environment-based socialization are intriguing aspects increasingly explored over the last decades. With the aim of supporting urban revitalization d...

Shrinkage has increasingly become a “standard pathway” of urban and regional development in many European cities and regions. Shrinking is generally seen in the literature as a negative phenomenon: certain strategies may, however, trigger-off positive effects, such as social networking opportunities, affordable housing, and an increased sense of id...

Cities and territories share structural references to a common environmental ontology, in which space perception and representation play a major role. Many human abilities deal with space management, whose ontology can be useful in building intelligent machines in which space conceptualization plays a fundamental role. Space organizing is an import...

Agents, agent-oriented modelling and multi-agent systems (MAS) introduce new and unconventional concepts in computer science. These elements are able to sparkle new modelling perspectives in behavioural knowledge and in environmental domain, where interactions between humans and natural/artificial agents are not standardized. MAS are considered as...

An increasing debate is growing today, in both academic and research-in-action contexts, about the roles of new and traditional technologies in raising knowledge of agents involved, as well as in boosting an effective development of communities. The last century has been largely dominated by capital-intensive technologies, impacting large and popul...

In order to face the challenges of a tumultuous social, economic, environmental complexity, urban systems have undertaken new forms of readjustments and transformations able to shock consolidated planning and design approaches. The role of agents' spatial cognition (perception, representation) has proved to be critical toward effective decision-mak...

The phenomenon of Urban heat islands (UHI) is most pronounced in areas with high urbanization and complex phenomena, in which the domains of interaction between humans and the environment are not standardized. In this context, an approach fairly attentive to agents’ (particularly human) behaviors represents an interesting research perspective. The...

Human agents conceptualize, design and organize spaces for human organizations by using numerous routine and non-routine cognitive processes [Schön, 1983]. Automated reasoning and design agents still provide only bad copies of human performances [Hofstadter, 1995]. Here, creativity is postulated as a non-routine sophisticated human cognitive functi...

Many human abilities deal with space management, whose ontology can be useful in building intelligent machines in which space conceptualization plays a fundamental role. Space organizing is an important category of spatial human abilities, in which sensorial and mental abilities intriguingly interact (Freksa et al., 2005). As usual, the analysis of...

The legacy of the awareness of complexity in social/natural environments involves a dramatic increase in uncertainty when dealing with complex systems. The traditional deterministic and quantitative approach to planning and decisionmaking in risky contexts increasingly seems to fall short in environmental domains, as often reported. Indeed, real si...

The study deals with cooperative space conceptualization by humans according to the AI-based cognitive approach and the urban-planning approach of architects and planners. It carries out the diagnosis and the control of example spaces in known urban environments. The paper is oriented toward suggesting system architectures to let spatial agents add...

The concept of community governance is generally intended as the management of complex processes underlying the inherent complexity of the environment. As a matter of facts, this complex approach provides the diffused, delocalized and multiagent management processes taking place on settled territories with a multiscalar, multisectoral and transdisc...

This paper deals with the environmental awareness in planners' education. It investigates the awareness of students in an Italian school of building engineering. The main objective is to evaluate if and how the levels of environmental cognition and sensitivity in students are affected by the knowledge delivered by the course programme, depending on...

An increasing concern about urban environmental quality has grown in the last decades caused by urban production mechanisms. Now, policies and ICT models need to integrate traditional quantitative techniques with more complex multiagent tools to support effective recovery strategies. Basing on a hybrid scenario approach, the present research links...

An interesting debate is growing today about the roles of new and traditional technologies in raising knowledge of agents involved, as well as in boosting effective community development. The last century has been largely dominated by capital-intensive technologies, impacting large and populated areas. From the 1990s, due to social, financial, envi...

Meanings and roles of memories and creativity in spatial organizations are raising increasing attention among scholars and professionals. Creativity in cognition-oriented spatial studies is gradually seen as a normal feature of an organization. This thesis is supported, e.g., by the evidences on the role of memory in the most creative parts of the...

Many research debates are recently facing the role of technologies in boosting community development through the raising of agents’ knowledge. As a matter of facts, only capital-intensive technologies have increasingly dominated throughout centuries, with wide and large impacts over populated areas. However, during the last couple of decades, many...

The new complexity of planning knowledge implies innovation of planning methods, in both substance and procedure. The development of multi-agent cognitive processes, particularly when the agents are diverse and dynamically associated to their interaction arenas, may have manifold implications. In particular, interesting aspects are scale problems o...

Landscapes and townscapes have been studied by many disciplinary areas over time. This study addresses the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of environmental spacescapes in planning by human agents. In fact, because of their dynamic complexity, environmental spacescapes create challengesfor the typical spatial behaviour of an agent perceiving and...

Landscapes and townscapes have been studied by many disciplinary areas over time. This study addresses the cognitive and perceptual dimensions of environmental spacescapes in planning by human agents. In fact, because of their dynamic complexity, environmental spacescapes create challengesfor the typical spatial behaviour of an agent perceiving and...

The literature on spatial environments concerns many disciplines, and the present study aims at broadly contributing from an urban-planning view. Indoor and outdoor townscapes, because of their dynamic complexity, seem to offer ill-structured holds to the typical spatial behaviour of an agent. Therefore, a question arises about the ‘fundamentals’ o...

The new complexity of planning knowledge implies innovation of planning methods, in both substance and procedure. In this concern, an increasing number of experiences on multi-agent interactions is today located within processes of spatial and environmental planning. Case studies have not been deliberately set up using formalized and/or predefined...

Social systems evolve dynamically in any environmental domain, either regions or neighbourhoods, with cooperation - but also with conflict - among multiple agents and cultures. New plans aim at building discourses and visions related to evolving situations where stakeholders locate their behaviours, meanwhile learning about themselves and surroundi...

Today, preserving the environment increasingly means raising and fostering its knowledge as a common good. Basically, a perspective of entirety in preservation coexists with a perspective of multiplicity, since diversities and inter-connections characterize the environment (Goudie, 2000). Consequently, environment knowledge is itself multiple and c...

The mainstream literature on globalization and regional transformation emphasizes two major perspectives. The first perspective combines global city theory with macro theories of transformations with a normative bias often leading to deterministic conceptualisations of globalization links to regional transformation. The other perspective emphasizes...

Since from the 1980s, computer science and artificial intelligence have focused on environmental planning, with high interest in analysing real and virtual cognitive agents at work. This is true for procedures, long-range planning, operational planning, as well as factors and scenarios of future events, future risks, multi-agent organisation, and r...

International concerns about security in transport systems are leading to a new international regulation in this field. This introduces new requirements for operators and authorities as well as it opens new challenges, in particular when referred to seaports and maritime transport in the Mediterranean area, where many seaport terminals and infrastr...

The new argumentative and communicative approach to environmental planning is replacing the traditional approach of planning derived from cybernetic models and based on the linear control of systems' dynamics. The traditional absolute monologic rationality of planning is today challenged by more complex, multilogic, multivalue and weak rationality,...

Mobility infrastructure planning is an increasingly crucial aspect of environmental planning, essential to boost regional economies and social relations, as well as critical for environmental impacts involved. Structuring inherently complex issues and problems is a major challenge of mobility planning. Today, therefore, a major issue is the settin...

The upcoming argumentative approach to environmental planning is increasingly spreading out, challenging the traditional strong and absolute rationality of planning. Aiming at structuring the complex issues of the environmental domain, rather than simplify problems, several agents need to interact, locate and share behaviours and knowledge, meanwhi...

In environmental planning, the new communicative approach is replacing the traditional linear cybernetic approach, with a multilogic rationality that challenges the absolute rationality of planning. In this light, a crucial role is played by communication and representation platforms insofar as they support the exchanging and fine-tuning of knowled...

Oftentimes, the need to build multidiscipline knowledge bases, oriented to policy scenarios, entails the involvement of stakeholders in manifold domains, with a juxtaposition of different languages whose semantics can hardly allow inter-domain transfers. A useful support for planning is the building up of durable IT-based interactive platforms, whe...

The past century ended with an unexpected explosion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), both in planning/managing public policies, and in exchanging knowledge. However, the extent to which ICT-based tools increase the level of public knowledge, or help decision makers is still uncertain. Although indirectly, the overload of unfilte...

Recent development in information technology has led to increased use of computer-based techniques in brainstorming that often forms an essential element in participatory scenario building. This paper compares the prepa­ration of participatory scenarios with and without the use of computer ­based methods respectively in certain phases of Future Wor...

Recent development in information technology has led to increased use of computer-based techniques in brainstorming that often forms an essential element in participatory scenario building. This paper compares the preparation of participatory scenarios with and without the use of computer based methods respectively in certain phases of Future Works...

This paper deals with issues raised by proposals for a new Italian planning law put forward by the Italian Planning Institute (INU). The ideas presented by the INU are innovative, both from the strategic and operational planning standpoint. Unfortunately, the proposed law does not address the problem of integrating the roles played by public planne...

1 The paper tries to contribute in this field of environmental awareness in the education of future urban planners, looking at limits and potentials of this education al need by investigating the argumentation and interaction performances of 2nd-year students of Urban Planning, in an Italian school of engineering. The objective is twofold: on one h...

The digital revolution, that directly involves the Information and Communication Technology (ICT), can be considered as one of the most recent innovations able to deeply modify our society. Policy makers, both local and global, increasingly recognize the potentiality of change, and they propose strategies aiming at reaching goals linked to such key...