Micro-simulation of tourists´ behaviors in nature heritage resort : a case study on mount emei scenic area

It is important to study the tourists´ behaviors for protecting and managing the nature heritage resorts. Based on the study of visitors´ individual spatial behaviors, the author developed a tourists´ spatial behaviors simulator (TSBS), which employs GIS to manage the spatial data, analyze and display the simulation results, Multi Agent System to simulate spatial behaviors of numerous individual visitors. In TSBS, tourist resort is represented by a network. There are 2 kinds of network elements: nodes, and links. Each tourist group is simulated by an agent that stored the attributes of tourist group and can update autonomously in some predetermined rules. The simulation process is controlled by the simulation clock. Agents´ speed, location and other d-attributes are updated at every clock step. All these results will be recorded in Agent state table. By analyzing this table, all the tourists´ behaviors in scenic area can be visualized and quantified. In this paper, tourists´ behaviors in Mount Emei listed in word heritage list are simulated based on TSBS. The results show that TSBS can simulate the tourists´ behaviors relative accurately and quickly.