SUSTAINCITY

Increasing concerns about sustainable development and the growth of urban areas have brought forth in recent years a renewed enthusiasm and need for the use of quantitative models in the field of transportation and spatial planning.

This project proposes to improve urban simulation models and their interaction with transport models. Unified operational models that favour a microscopic approach, such as UrbanSim and ILUTE (Integrated Land Use, Transportation, and Environment Modelling System) have recently gained a lot of interest both in the land use and transport communities. Nevertheless, in their current forms these models still require further development to support a comprehensive analysis of the main environmental and socio-economic questions of the sustainability of urban growth and the relevant public policies.

The goal of this project is to address the modelling and computational issues of integrating modern mobility simulations with the latest micro-simulation land use models. The project intends to advance the state-of-the-art in the field of the micro-simulation of prospective integrated models of Land-Use and Transport (LUTI). On the modelling side, the main challenges are to integrate a demographic evolution module, to add an environmental module, to improve the overall consistency and, last but not least, to deal with the multi-scale aspects of the problem: several time horizons and spatial resolutions are involved.