Virtual Laboratory for Simulation of Urban Landuse Change Through Coupling Cellular Automation with GIS

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The functionality of spatio-temporal analysis and modeling is a drive for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to further applications in various applied fields and Digital Earth plan. However, currently commercial GIS systems lack those capabilities for spatio-temporal. distribution, prediction, and simulation of spatio-temporal data. So more effective and powerful modeling methods need to be developed. Cellular Automata Model (CA) provides GIS with a bottom-to-top spatio-temporal modeling framework, which is composed of a fourfold: cells, states, neighbors and rules. The simplicity and flexibility make CA able to simulate a variety of behaviors of complex systems, such as urban land use evolution. By expanding CA model to spatial domain and integrating CA with GIS, a new model (SUDS) for simulating urban land use evolution was established. To take Baotou City as a case study, this model was used to simulate the evolution of urban expansion and sustainable land use. This initial time is 1992 when land use data were acquired by aerial photography. The change data collected by differential GPS are used for model calibration. The appropriate extents of Baotou City development in 1998, 2005 and 2012 are simulated. The result of 1998 is consistent with the surveyed data with GPS. Thus, the established model can be used as a virtual laboratory for decision support in urban planning and land policy-making.