Aplicação de modelos baseados em autômatos celulares no estudo da expansão urbana

Abstract

The unplanned growth of cities represents a burdensome problem for the maintenance of human activities and the environment. The solution to urban problems associated with uncontrolled growth depends on the use of scientific and technological tools that enable the construction of future scenarios for the urban landscape. For this purpose, cellular automata (CA) are suitable as an easy-to-implement method in a computational environment, and this work addresses some aspects related to the computer simulation of urban systems based on CA. The objective of this work is to present the use of cellular automata in the computer simulation of the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban expansion. For this, an exploratory and qualitative bibliographic research of scientific articles published between 2020 and October 2022 relevant to the use of CA in the study of urban expansion was carried out. The articles were evaluated for the effects of the historical process on the simulation, the size of the neighborhood, and the stochastic instability component used in constructing the land cover transition function. Historical processes and the temporal distance between the occurrence and simulation periods were discussed because the evolution of the urban landscape results from path-dependent phenomena. Regarding the size of the neighborhood, it was discussed that only models with cell dimensions larger than 1000×1000 m reflected negative effects in the model, as determining factors operate at different scales in the model's evolution. Finally, the instability factor proved to be an important element for simulating random events that lead to the system's evolution, and the way it is introduced in the models is not clearly defined in the literature.