From cellular automata to land use models

Cellular automata that originated from the field of computer science and complexity theory soon found their way into various disciplines. There are several good reasons for the implementation of cellular automata in urban growth and land use change studies, mainly the bottom-up generation of land use change or the availability of raster data on land use and land cover. On the other hand, cellular automata do not explicitly represent the land use change factors and other land use change factors are completely ignored. To overcome the deficiencies of cellular automata for land use modelling, significant modifications to the original concept of cellular automata were adopted. This paper will present the improvements in structured form based on examples of several existing simulation models.