Development and applications of urban cellular automata in China

China has come to a new era of rapid urbanization and urban expansion. Since the late 1990s, many studies on using cellular automata techniques have been carried out to tackle urban and regional development problems. Cellular automata (CA) have been used as a useful tool to support land use planning and policy analysis as well as to explore scenarios for future development in this fast developing country. There is a growing demand for the application of CA in some planning departments in major Chinese cities. Especially, many applications are found in the coastal cities, such as Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing in China. Significant modifications have been made so that CA can be suited to a lot of urban simulation and planning tasks in this region. Much effort has been made to generate a high degree of reality in urban simulation by using a richer set of GIS data for the calibration. Some classical CA models have been established by Chinese scholars who have used a variety of intelligent methods, such as MCE, ANN, and GA methods, for calibrating these models.