An Agent-Driven Virtual Environment for the Simulation of Land Use Decision Making

Observations of land-use decisions made within the virtual environment will lead to an improved understanding of the factors that are taken into account when making such decisions. For example, icons showing environmental quality can be displayed in the virtual environment to indicate the environmental impact of land-use choices. These can be switched on or off in different simulation runs to better understand their effect on the human user’s future land-use decisions. In addition, the information viewed by the human user in the MS Access database is tracked to monitor the type of information that is used to arrive at a land-use decision. The effect of individual variables on the land-use decisions can be seen by gradually introducing information about different factors into the decision-making environment.