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CASA Working Paper 176

WP176

12 December 2011

Calibrating Cellular Automata Models for Simulating Urban Growth: Comparative Analysis of SLEUTH and Metronamica

For almost two decades, cellular automata (CA) has proven to be a popular and sometimes effective modeling approach to the study of complex urban systems. Not only as a new methods for predictive simulation but also as a practical policy support tool, CA models have been applied to a large collection of diverse urban regions which now provide a good basis for comparative analysis. After sketching some basic ideas about how CA models can be applied to urban systems, we describe and then calibrate two well known and widely applied CA models, SLEUTH and Metronamica, to simulate the future urban growth of the Seoul Metropolitan Area, Korea.

This is for the express purpose of generating the impacts of practical planning policies on the study area and of conducting comparative explorations of these CA models themselves. The results confirm the value of CA which provides a rich exploratory of knowledge for investigating dynamic urban growth systems and for evaluating the impacts of possible policy options. Moreover, the concurrent use of two generic CA models provides certain insights in the use and development of CA urban models in general and these two models in particular.

 

Authors: Donghan Kim & Michael Batty

Publication Date: 12/2011

RPS ID:

Download working paper No. 176. File size 3.61MB, PDF format.