Agent-based modelling of office market for a land use and transport model

This paper proposes an agent-based office market model, as a component of a Land Use and Transport (L-T) model, SelfSim, to simulate how firms and office buildings co-evolve over time. Essentially, the office market model is involved in both firm demography and office building development: the firmographic model is capable of simulating four typical events, namely, firm birth, growth, relocation and closure; the office building development model is to simulate how facility agents develop office buildings, according to the demand from firms, which is associated with the firm demography. The office market model was tested within theoretical examples set up based on a Chinese medium-sized city, Baoding: both global and local Sensitivity Analyses (SAs) were conducted to explore how the twenty seven key model parameters could influence the thirteen model outputs of interest, identifying five influential parameters. Finally, some specific spatially disaggregate model results were presented

Assessing land-use and transport integration via a spatial composite indexing model

Achieving sustainable urban development is identified as one ultimate goal of many contemporary planning endeavours and has become central to formulation of urban planning policies. Within this concept, land-use and transport integration is highlighted as one of the most important and attainable policy objectives. In many cities, integration is embraced as an integral part of local development plans, and a number of key integration principles are identified. However, the lack of available evaluation methods to measure extent of urban sustainability levels prevents successful implementation of these principles. This paper introduces a new indicator-based spatial composite indexing model developed to measure sustainability performance of urban settings by taking into account land-use and transport integration principles. Model indicators are chosen via a thorough selection process in line with key principles of land-use and transport integration. These indicators are grouped into categories and themes according to their topical relevance. These indicators are then aggregated to form a spatial composite index to portray an overview of the sustainability performance of the pilot study area used for model demonstration. The study results revealed that the model is a practical instrument for evaluating success of local integration policies and visualizing sustainability performance of built environments and useful in both identifying problematic areas as well as formulating policy interventions