Modeling urban growth in a metropolitan area based on bidirectional flows, an improved gravitational field model, and partitioned cellular automata

Simulating urban landscape dynamics in metropolitan areas has attracted much attention lately, but the difficulty remains. Although large-scale urban simulation studies consider spatial interaction as an important factor, spatial interaction cannot be accurately measured based on a single element flow, and its effects may not strictly follow a distance decay function. Furthermore, different cities may require different transition rules. In this study, we combined bidirectional flows of population and information and an improved gravitational field model to model the urban spatial interaction, and we then integrated a partitioned cellular automata (CA) model to simulate the urban growth for different cities in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis. It was found that the simulation results generated by the CA model considering spatial interaction are significantly improved. Furthermore, partitioned conversion thresholds can effectively improve the model performance. The proposed model showed a much better performance in the simulation of subordinate cities surrounding the core cities, than for the core cities and fringe cities. We suggest that large-scale urban simulation should pay more attention to the development of partitioned transition rules. The effects of intercity urban flows should also be considered in the simulation of small- and medium-sized cities near the regional cores.