Agent Based Simulation for Understanding Urban Dynamics

Abstract

A city is generally considered as an organic complex system. A city is highly interactive and contains various interactive sub-divisions and is also being affected by various factors like land use patterns, population growth, government policies, transportation infrastructure and highly on demand and supply of goods. Among these factors land-use patterns and transportation infrastructure are considered to be affecting the urban growth on a long term basis.In the present scenario, the cities in this world contains more than half percent of the world’s population, and which is expected to increase drastically throughout this century. Speaking about the growth of the city, some questions such as which cities are expected to grow over time, if the growth happens what will be the patterns followed, and how the infrastructure of the city will cope- up with the growth. In order to study and explore this urban evolution, modeling and simulation could be considered as powerful tools.The objective of this research is to analyze and model urban growth. Urban growth modeling is an interdisciplinary field, so this research is to make an effort to integrate knowledge and methods from other scientific and technical areas to advance network analysis and modeling. Multi agent system could be applied to model urban growth with considering population growth as the main driving factor of urban growth.The main objective of the research is the bottom-up approach in analyzing the data and modelling the urban growth, in order to get better understanding on problems like congestion, segregation, urban sprawl etc. The purpose of the work is to examine the feasibility of applying the concepts of multi agent systems and agent based modeling in the construction of the model of a city. We will develop an algorithmic approach for this purpose and examine a method of supporting the algorithm by evolving the necessary computational rules that control agent behavior and decision making.This idea of this paper is to give an overview of MAS models and comparing and contrasting them with the past generation models by understanding how the different elements of a city interact with each other and an ability to have better understanding of cities in near future.