Puma: Multi-agent Modelling of Urban Systems

It is increasingly recognised that land use change processes are the outcome of decisions made by individual actors, such as land owners, authorities, firms and households. In order to improve the theoretical basis of land use modelling and to represent land use chnages in a behaviourally more realistic way, we are developing PUMA (Predicting Urbanisation with Multi-Agents), a full fledged multi-agent system of urban processes. PUMA consists of various modules, representing the behaviours of specific actors. The land conversion module describes farmers', authorities', investors' and developers' decisions to sell or buy land and develop it into other uses. The households module describes households' housing and work careers in relation to life cycle events (marriage, child birth, aging, job change etc.) and also their daily activity patterns. The firms module includes firms' demography and their related demand for production facilities leading to (re)location processes. The paper describes the model specification and calibration of the households module. The households module was implemented and tested for the Northwing of the Dutch Randstad, including about 1.5 million households and 1.6 million dwellings. The paper describes the implementation and the first model results.