Verifying and validating a land use transport environment model

This paper verifies and validates an urban land use-transport-environment educational model, CityPlan, developed by the authors. CityPlan is designed as an educational tool for analysing interactions between urban land use. transport and the environment. To ensure the model can replicate existing cities, verification and validation of the model are required before its application. Verification of the model was carried out using data for the city of Adelaide, Australia. Estimated parameters from the verification study are then applied to another Australian city, Melbourne, to validate the model. The validation of the model has shown that CityPlan can replicate data describing city growth over the study period at a reasonable accuracy level. CityPlan has been applied in various institutions and organisations in Asia, Europe and North America. The application of the model has shown that CityPlan is a very useful tool to assist people in understanding the complexity of land use, transport and environmental interaction. This paper presents the verification and validation results of the model. The application of CityPlan is also discussed.