Beijing Urban Development Model: Urban Growth Analysis and Simulation

Urban growth analysis and simulation have been recently conducted by cellular automata (CA) models based on self-organizing theory which differs from system dynamics models. This paper describes the Beijing urban development model (BUDEM) which adopts the CA approach to support urban planning and policy evaluation. BUDEM, as a spatio-temporal dynamic model for simulating urban growth in the Beijing metropolitan area, is based on the urban growth theory and integrates logistic regression and MonoLoop to obtain the weights for the transition rule with multi-criteria evaluation configuration. Local sensitivity analysis for all the parameters of BUDEM is also carried out to assess the model's performances. The model is used to identify urban growth mechanisms in the various historical phases since 1986, to retrieve urban growth policies needed to implement the desired (planned) urban form in 2020, and to simulate urban growth scenarios until 2049 based on the urban form and parameter set in 2020. The model has been proved to be capable of analyzing historical urban growth mechanisms and predicting future urban growth for metropolitan areas in China.