- A framework for integrated modelling of urban systems    275 kb by    Ben-Akiva, Moshe & Pereira, Francisco & Zegras, Christopher &, de Almeida Ana Maria et.al. | camara@mit.edu    Short Outline This project proposes to develop an integrated model of land use, transportation, and energy, taking Lisbon as a case study. Such a model is being implemented on the urbanism platform. The outputs are related to urban metabolism models. Abstract Growth of urban population and wealth have implied an increasing demand for land in cities worldwide with the consequent effects on land prices, equity and also lack of efficiency in the used resources, particularly regarding time and energy. In parallel, the demand within transport systems is following similar patterns with strong consequences for ecology and economy. Development of modeling tools to help the selection and design of appropriate policies is an extremely difficult task since urban systems comprise a large and heterogeneous set of agents that interact in different markets and time scales. Therefore, it is not surprising that empirical studies show that the final effect of public policies in this area often contradicts predictions. This can be attributed to methodological drawbacks in the analysis derived from an aggregate treatment of the agents and from not integrating the different components that interact in the urban system. This article presents the first stage in the development of an integrated micro-simulation model of land use, transportation, and energy for the evaluation of a range of “green policies” aiming at enhancing sustainability and well-being. The model will eventually include both individual/household behavior components and organization/firm behavior components and is based on model estimation and simulation of agents’ behavior at a micro level. The outputs of the model include aggregate energy and resource consumptions that are combined with outputs from an aggregate system dynamics models of urban metabolism. The MIT-Portugal program sponsors this stage of the model system development and the initial application will be for the city of Lisbon, Portugal. Keywords Behaviour Modeling, Urban Metabolism, Integrated Simulation, Green policies Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper