A Study On The Urban Growth Model Based On Cellular Automata: Fuzhou City, China

Urban is the most complex spatio-temporal system. And the complexity is an essential characteristic of urban system for its complexity properties, such as non-equilibrium, exoteric, dynamic, self-organizing, randomicity, and so forth. Urban development is even more a complex transfer process, and it makes different land use transfer into built-up. As we all know, the land resource is not infinite, how to lead urban development toward health and make good use of land is critical to maintain the human's sustainable development. So study the law of urban expansion and the variation law of space structure has important realistic meanings. The traditional urban growth models have been unable to keep up with the rhythm of the contemporary land change, and can't comprehensively describe the urban development. This results in high uncertainty of the prediction. So it is extremely urgent to construct new urban model to model the growth of urban.Urban is a huge complex system. As an important tool for complexity research, Cellular Automata has been widely applied to simulate the process of urban growth for its dynamic and conceptual link with notions of self-organization. The basic idea of Cellular automata is very simple. In a grid space, a series of transition rules are enforced to govern the state of a randomly placed cell depending on the configuration of its neighborhood. We can see it's a very flexibly tool that allows us to use it in modeling urban growth. In fact recently modeling and predicting urban dynamics based on cellular automata has been a hot technique developed in urban spatial analysis field. With the utility of RS and GIS, the author constructed a model - UCA (Urban of Cellular Automata) system base on the cellular automata. And then the model was applied to the study of FUZHOU city's growth. According to the result of this experiment, the author draws a conclusion that the UCA is useful to give support to the decision of urban planning. Finally, the author summarizes the application of Cellular Automata and UCA, and gives some discussions and suggestions for the future work.