The Cellular Automaton Eats the Regions: Unified Modeling of Activities and Land Use in a Variable Grid Cellular Automaton
Roger White, Guy Engelen, Inge Uljee · The MIT Press eBooks · 2015
Land use is an expression of activity, thus it is more reasonable to model both simultaneously within a single framework. This is done with a variable grid activity based CA. The neighbourhood of each cell is the entire modelled region, so the neighbourhood effect includes a distance decay weighting function capturing processes operating at all scales. A variable grid, in which the cells of the neighbourhood are aggregated into increasingly large supercells as distance from the reference cell increases, ensures that run times remain comparable to those of a conventional CA. Each cell may have multiple activities (population, retail, etc.) at various densities, which permits more realistic modelling in urban areas. Land use corresponds to the dominant activity. An application to Dublin includes comparisons with the other modelling approaches; applications to Belgium include one in which agricultural activity is modelled.