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Cellular automata (CA) have been used to understand the complexity and dynamics of cities. The logistic cellular automaton (Logistic-CA) is a popular urban CA model for simulating urban growth based on logistic regression. However, this model usually employs a cell-based simulation strategy without considering the spatial evolution of land-use patches. This drawback largely constrains the Logistic-CA for simulating realistic urban development. We proposed a Patch-Logistic-CA to deal with this problem by incorporating a patch-based simulation strategy into the conventional cell-based Logistic-CA. The Patch-Logistic-CA differentiates new developments into spontaneous growth and organic growth, and uses a moving-window approach to simulate the evolution of urban patches. The Patch-Logistic-CA is tested through the simulation of urban growth in Guangzhou, China, during 2005–2012. The cell-based Logistic-CA was also implemented using the same set of data to make a comparison. The simulation results reflect that the Patch-Logistic-CA has slightly lower cell-level agreement than the cell-based Logistic-CA. However, visual inspection of the results reveals that the cell-based Logistic-CA fails to reflect the actual patterns of urban growth, because this model can only simulate urbanized cells around the edges of initial urban patches. Actually, the pattern-level similarities of the Patch-Logistic-CA are over 18% higher than those of the cell-based Logistic-CA. This indicates that the Patch-Logistic-CA has much better performance of simulating actual development patterns than the cell-based Logistic-CA. In addition, the Patch-Logistic-CA can correctly simulate the fractal structure of actual urban development patterns. By varying the control parameters, the Patch-Logistic-CA can also be used to assist urban planning through the exploration of different development alternatives.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.