UrbanSim: interaction and participation in integrated urban land use, transportation, and environmental modeling

ABSTRACT

The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system or freeway, setting an urban growth boundary, changing tax policy, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. Our goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios, and then to evaluate these scenarios by modeling the resulting patterns of urban growth and redevelopment, of transportation usage, and of environmental impacts, over periods of 20-30 years. UrbanSim, combined with transportation models and macroeconomic inputs, performs simulations of the interactions among urban development, transportation, land use, and environmental impacts. It consists of a set of interacting component models that simulate different actors or processes within the urban environment.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Borning, B. Friedman, J. Davis, and P. Lin. Informing public deliberation: Value sensitive design of indicators for a large-scale urban simulation. In Proc. 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Paris, Sept. 2005.
• 2: Janet Davis, Household indicators: design to inform and engage citizens, CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1125451.1125591]
• 3: H. Ševčíková, A. Raftery, and P. Waddell. Assessing uncertainty in urban simulations using Bayesian melding. Submitted for publication - draft available from www.urbansim.org/papers/BMinUrbansim.pdf, 2006.
• 4: P. Waddell, H. Ševčíková, D. Socha, E. Miller, and K. Nagel. Opus: An open platform for urban simulation. Presented at the Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management Conference, London, June 2005. Available from www.urbansim.org/papers.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management
          Subjects: Systems analysis and design

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.3 Applications
      I.6.5 Model Development
          Subjects: Modeling methodologies

General Terms:
Design, Management