Improving Exploratory Analysis in Land-use Transportation Interaction Models

Cities are growing rapidly in terms of population, land use and transport services. New housing developments and transport infrastructure are key triggers for the process of change. As cities grow from new infrastructure and land-cover changes, the need to coordinate these changes with the government land-use and transport policies also increases. Urban planners use Land-use transportation interaction models to coordinate the cities' development with the land-use and transport policies in order to diagnose the impact of these policies in the development of cities. This paper proposes the Bogota Urban Simulator (BUS), which was developed to assist the policy assessment process in urban planning for the city of Bogota. The proposed simulator comprises a web application for the publication and execution of urban models, a distributed processing system and an interactive visual analytic environment for the exploration of policies. The architectural decisions considered in the development of the simulator are described; in addition, a performance evaluation of the resulting service oriented simulator is conducted.