SimUrban: A Novel Prototype to Simulate Urban Development through the Integrated GIS and CA with Hybrid Transition Rules

A novel prototype, SimUrban, is developed to simulate urban development through the integrated GIS and cellular automata (CA) with hybrid transition rules. This new framework consists of three tiers: data, operation and display for different purposes. Based on Object-Oriented Technology (OOP), we built the SimUrban framework using ArcGIS Engine and VS.Net. The open framework has favorable extensibility and user defined functions, and more applied functions and new transition rules can be integrated with the system. Finally, several key modules are displayed and analyzed in detail in this paper.