[starlogo-users] city modeling with starlogo and cellular automata

[Greg K]

That is cool. Many years ago Will Wright told me that the first version
of SimCity was driven by a cellular automaton with just a few global
diffeq's added into the mix. It's fun to see Starlogo getting used for
city modelling, too.

greg

On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 13:34 -0800, Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
> All,
> 
> I thought you'd get a kick out of this excerpt from
> an announcement of a presentation local to Arizona
> State University, 2006/02/09. Starlogo proves useful
> yet again.
> 
> xanthian.
> 
> Prof. Daniel Czamanski, City and Regional Planning,
> Technion Institute of Technology, Israel, Director
> of the City Complexity Research Lab, and Chairman of
> Czamanski Ben Shahar and Co.
> 
> The evolution of urban spatial morphology is
> discontinuous in space and non-uniform in time. As a
> result, precise descriptions are elusive. In a
> series of previous papers we depicted, analyzed, and
> endowed with at least partial explanations, the
> dynamics of the Tel Aviv morphology based
> exclusively on historic 2D data of urban footprints
> and on socio-economic time series and cross-sections
> data. In this paper we begin to depict and analyze
> the spatial and temporal processes of the Tel Aviv
> 3D urban morphology.
> 
> To this end we present a rudimentary 3D cellular
> automaton simulation model in which the city's shape
> is referenced by means of temporal changes in the
> volume of buildings, height distribution of
> buildings and their spatial distribution. The model
> uses a 2-D grid. The objects in the cells are the
> buildings that have variable height. Each of these
> cells has a neighborhood of eight cells, called
> "Moore's neighborhood".  The model describes a city
> growing from flat with zero average height to one
> with agglomerations of skyscrapers. In the heart of
> the model there are four parameters: Initial
> building share, Inertia, interaction with neighbors
> and noise. Those parameters are very similar to the
> matching parameters in Batty [1998].
> 
> The simulations are carried out using Starlogo
> software, and experiments are conducted with
> systematic variation of the four parameters. The
> results indicate that cities can experience
> different path growths.  Cities can be in
> convergence path or in divergence course and this
> depends on the setting of the parameters in the
> model. Very interesting evidence is the existence of
> a sharp borderline between the two zones of path
> settings. The model also supports changing the
> values of parameters in time; those changes in
> conditions reveal that in the synthetic environment
> of this lab, cities can change their behavior
> drastically and even experience phase transitions.
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