Modelling Land Use Change and Land Development Using Agent: Opportunities and Challenges

Investigate the phenomenon of land use change and land development in terms of object-oriented has led to the increasing popularity of the use of agent-based models (ABM) in land use planning studies. Agents can be considered as self-directed objects which sense their environment and react to it using certain functions and adjust their activities to reach their goals. Agent-based models considered as a method to determine the global outcome of a system which is derived from the behavior of a group of local factors. These models in a bottom-up approach and using local components in a heterogeneous environment are trying to retrieve the global patterns. Land use change and land development is a dynamic and complex process and agent-based models have inherent ability to modeling complex systems and provide an ideal framework for modeling of these process. In this paper¡ a comprehensive survey has been conducted on the articles published in the field of agent-based modeling of land use change and land development during the last few years. This paper aims to classify research issues to provide a better understanding of the prospects ahead for further studies on this type of modeling.