Agent-based modelling for urban planning current limitations and future trends

Abstract

With the global population expected to increase form 7.3 billion in 2015 to 9.5 billion by 2050 [41], smart city planning is becoming increasingly important. This is further exasperated by the fact that an increasing number of people are relocating to cities as we live in a highly urbanised world. Cities are evolving in complex and multidimensional ways that can no longer be limited to land use and transport development. In increasingly important that cities planning embraces a more holistic, participatory and iterative approach that balances productivity, livability and sustainability outcomes. A new generation of bottom up, highly granular, highly dynamic and spatially explicit models have emerged to support evidence-based and adaptive urban planning. Agent-based modelling, in particular, has emerged as a dominant paradigm to create massive simulations backed by ever-increasing computing power. In this paper we point at current limitations of pure bottom-up approaches to urban modelling and argue for more flexible frameworks mixing other modelling paradigms, particularly participatory planning approaches. Then, we explore four modelling challenges and propose future trends for agent-based modelling of urban systems to better support planning decisions.