Urban development and migration from rural to urban areas are impacting prime agricultural land and natural landscapes, particularly in the less developed countries. These phenomena will persist and require serious study by those monitoring global environmental change. To address this need, various models have been devised to analyze urbanization a

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.

This book contains all full papers presented at ACRI 2000, the Fourth International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, held at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), 4 - 6 October, 2000. The continuation of and growing interest in research on Cellular Automata models for real world phenomena indicates the feasibility of this approach. A quick glance at the table contents of this book shows that results came from such different areas as biology, economics, physics, traffic flow and urban development. This work is complemented by contributions on the implementation and evaluation of software for Cellular Automata simulation, which is a necessary (but of course in no way sufficient) ingredient for the successful application of Cellular Automata. Applying Cellular Automata without trying to understand their behavior, in depth would be an unfortunate development. But as properties and power in earlier years it was again one of the strong points of ACRI to bring together researchers not only from different application areas but also from theory. Of course, this is reflected by the list of accepted contributions which also comprise theoretical papers and even papers which certainly belong to the intersection of several fields. Examples are the generation and recognition of geometrical patters and the influence of possible failures on the power of CA which obviously are of relevance also to applications.

Geosimulation is hailed as ‘the next big thing’ in geographic modelling for urban studies. This book presents readers with an overview of this new and innovative field by introducing the spatial modelling environment and describing the latest research and development using cellular automata and multi-agent systems. Extensive case studies and working code is available from an associated website which demonstrate the technicalities of geosimulation, and provide readers with the tools to carry out their own modelling and testing. The first book to treat urban geosimulation explicitly, integrating socio-economic and environmental modelling approaches Provides the reader with a sound theoretical base in the science of geosimulation as well as applied material on the construction of geosimulation models Cross-references to an author-maintained associated website with downloadable working code for readers to apply the models presented in the book Visit the Author's Website for further information on Geosimulation, Geographic Automata Systems and Geographic Automata Software http://www.geosimulationbook.com

This is the era of Big Data and computational social science. It is an era that requires tools which can do more than visualise data but also model the complex relation between data and human action, and interaction. Agent-Based Models (ABM) - computational models which simulate human action and interaction – do just that. This textbook explains how to design and build ABM and how to link the models to Geographical Information Systems. It guides you from the basics through to constructing more complex models which work with data and human behaviour in a spatial context. All of the fundamental concepts are explained and related to practical examples to facilitate learning (with models developed in NetLogo with all code examples available on the accompanying website). You will be able to use these models to develop your own applications and link, where appropriate, to Geographical Information Systems. All of the key ideas and methods are explained in detail: geographical modelling; an introduction to ABM; the fundamentals of Geographical Information Science; why ABM and GIS; using QGIS; designing and building an ABM; calibration and validation; modelling human behavior. An applied primer, that provides fundamental knowledge and practical skills, it will provide you with the skills to build and run your own models, and to begin your own research projects.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion on urban growth and sprawl, and how they can be analyzed using remote sensing imageries. It compiles views of numerous researchers that help in understanding the urban growth and sprawl; their patterns, process, causes, consequences, and countermeasures; how remote sensing data and geographic information system techniques can be used in mapping, monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and simulating the urban growth and sprawl and what are the merits and demerits of available methods and models. This book will be of value for the scientists and researchers engaged in urban geographic research, especially using remote sensing imageries. This book will serve as a rigours literature review for them. Post graduate students of urban geography or urban/regional planning may refer this book as additional studies. This book may help the academicians for preparing lecture notes and delivering lectures. Industry professionals may also be benefited from the discussed methods and models along with numerous citations.

Currently, spatial analysis is becoming more important than ever because enormous volumes of spatial data are available from different sources, such as GPS, Remote Sensing, and others. This book deals with spatial analysis and modelling. It provides a comprehensive discussion of spatial analysis, methods, and approaches related to human settlements and associated environment. Key contributions with empirical case studies from Iran, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and Japan that apply spatial analysis including autocorrelation, fuzzy, voronoi, cellular automata, analytic hierarchy process, artificial neural network, spatial metrics, spatial statistics, regression, and remote sensing mapping techniques are compiled comprehensively. The core value of this book is a wide variety of results with state of the art discussion including empirical case studies. It provides a milestone reference to students, researchers, planners, and other practitioners dealing the spatial problems on urban and regional issues. We are pleased to announce that this book has been presented with the 2011 publishing award from the GIS Association of Japan. We would like to congratulate the authors!