Agent-based modelling of urban expansion and land cover change: a prototype for the analysis of commuting patterns in Geneva, Switzerland

Agent-based modelling has been used in many studies of urban expansion, land use and land cover change patterns. While representing a powerful tool for depicting and formulating predictions about the evolution of interconnected complex systems, this method also poses a series of challenges to the researcher community, most notably in terms of model calibration and validation, and output data visualisation. Based on these findings, we present an agent-based model developed in GAMA, coupled with a data exploration platform coded in python, for analysing commuting patterns in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Output datasets generated from a set of simple evolution rules for the agents, are d…