Abstract
The Urban Development Simulator is currently under development within the FP7 EU project urbanAPI
(2011-2014). The simulation tool is developed for the city of Ruse in remote northern Bulgaria at the
Romanian border as a support for the local urban planners and politicians to evaluate high level planning
decisions defined as use cases.
The tool is developed as generic simulation framework, thus the framework can be applied for other cities
too, to generate tailor-made urban planning support tools, if the necessary geospatial data about future
planning scenarios and related statistical data describing the socio-economic state and future expectations are
available.
The tool enables urban planners to estimate the impact of different urban development scenarios and
visualises spatial changes through dynamic GIS maps depicting the results of the simulations. It is based on
the analysis of geospatial data and uses an Agent-based modelling approach to simulate the development in
the city. While other urban development simulation tools usually model urban growth in the urban fringe, the
Urban Development Simulator concentrates on intra-urban development, as the City of Ruse turns out as a
shrinking city which is starting to recover since the last years - reorganizing the intra-urban structure.
The tool has a complex user interface and a web interfaces to interact with the local citizens. Thus different
planning scenarios and their effects can be visualized (also in 3D) via the web interface and the opinion of
the local residents can be involved into the planning decisions by voting for selected planning decisions as
preference of the citizens. The spatial pattern of the preferences serves as an input for the parameterization of
the Agent-based model to simulate the development trends within the different areas of the city. Scenarios
can be simulated what would be, if the urban planners would follow the citizens´ preferences. This enables
the decision makers to adapt their urban development plans by considering the preferences of the citizens.
Effects on e.g. the final energy demand and CO2 emissions for residential buildings are further calculated for
the different development scenarios.
The model runs as a Java web-start application and is hosted on a server at the AIT with remote access for
the Ruse users. For the model development the simulation platform MASGISmo (Multimethod Agent-based
(ABM) System dynamics (SD), GIS modelling platform) has been applied, a framework originally
developed during several prior projects to combine a bottom up agent-based simulation method (ABM) with
a top down - system dynamics (SD) approach. This platform is programmed in Java connected to several
external tools as a PostgreSQL (PostGIS) database, Vensim a (SD) tool and uses RepastJ as core ABM tool.
For the purpose of the Urban Development Simulator the GIS capability of the platform was enhanced with
more powerful GIS features, thus new planning scenarios can directly be introduced within the tool by the
urban planners.
The paper will concentrate on the description of the structure of the Urban Development Simulator, further
more explain the participatory citizen´s integration.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | PLAN IT SMART CLEVER SOLUTIONS FOR SMART CITIES; 19. internationale Konferenz zu Stadtplanung und Regionalentwicklung in der Informationsgesellschaft GeoMultimedia 2014 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Research Field
- Former Research Field - Energy