T J T L U http://jtlu.org V. 11 N. 1 [2018] pp. 1231–1256 An agent- and GIS-based virtual city creator: A case study of Beijing, China Chengxiang Zhuge Chunfu Shao University of Cambridge Beijing Jiaotong University
[email protected] [email protected] Shuling Wang Ying Hu Beijing Transport Institute Beijing Transport Institute
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract: Many agent-based integrated urban models have been de- Article history: veloped to investigate urban issues, considering the dynamics and feed- Received: July 29, 2017 backs in complex urban systems. The lack of disaggregate data, however, Received in revised form: has become one of the main barriers to the application of these models, March 4, 2018 though a number of data synthesis methods have been applied. To gen- Accepted: July 16, 2018 erate a complete dataset that contains full disaggregate input data for Available online: December 5, model initialization, this paper develops a virtual city creator as a key 2018 component of an agent-based land-use and transport model, SelfSim. The creator is a set of disaggregate data synthesis methods, including a genetic algorithm (GA)-based population synthesizer, a transport facil- ity synthesizer, an activity facility synthesizer and a daily plan genera- tor, which use the household travel survey data as the main input. Fi- nally, the capital of China, Beijing, was used as a case study. The creator was applied to generate an agent- and Geographic Information System (GIS)-based virtual Beijing containing individuals, households, trans- port and activity facilities, as well as their attributes and linkages.