We are constructing integrated models of urban land use, transportation, and environmental impacts. Our purpose is to provide tools for stakeholders such as urban planners, government staff, and citizens' groups to help predict future patterns of urban development under different possible scenarios over periods of twenty or more years. These tools should support deliberation and debate on such issues as building new transit systems or freeways, or changing zoning or economic incentives, as well as on broader issues such as sustainable, livable cities, economic vitality, social equity, and environmental preservation.
A wide-ranging set of computer science research issues are raised by this activity – in software engineering, human computer interaction, graphics, databases, AI, domain-specific programming languages, and others. So far our work in CSE on this project has been primarily in the areas of software engineering and HCI.
For more information, including papers and Open Source software, please see the UrbanSim home page.
CSE faculty contact: Alan Borning.