Exurbia from the bottom-up: Confronting empirical challengesto characterizing a complex system

Ma Yan
Exurbia from the bottom-up: Confronting empirical challengesto characterizing a complex system
Daniel G. Brown, Derek T. Robinson, Li An, Joan I. Nassauer, Moira Zellner,William Rand, Rick Riolo, Scott E. Page, Bobbi Low, Zhifang Wang
Geoforum 39 (2008) 805–818
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/sluce/publications/geoforum_proof.pdf

Abstract:
This paper described empirical results from a multi-disciplinary project that support modeling complex processes of land-use and land-coverchange in exurban parts of Southeastern Michigan. Based on two different conceptual models, one describing the evolution of urbanform as a consequence of residential preferences and the other describing land-cover changes in an exurban township as a consequenceof residential preferences, local policies, and a diversity of development types, it described a variety of empirical data collected to supportthe mechanisms that encoded in computational agent-based models.
To simulate the residential preferences of residents, the utility model was utilized to reflect the residential location chooose by residents. This utility function the agents use is a variation of the Cobb-Douglas utility function. For the utility part, the socioeconomic characteristics of household is considered.