Modelling evolution of urban agglomerations based on cellular automata

Urban development and evolution of urban agglomeration are the important parts of the urban agglomeration theory. This paper uses complex system simulation cellular automata (CA) to study the evolution of the urban agglomeration, which simulates the process of the formation of urban agglomeration. This paper mainly considers the city appearance, expansion and formation. It analyzes the extended structure of the urban agglomeration space of China and summarizes the spatial expansion mode of urban agglomeration. It refers to the driving force of urban development from the comprehensive perspective. This research extracts the indicators which affect the urban development. Then it establishes the framework of the driving force of urban development. We set the driving force of urban development as an overall value. The CA model could achieve the driving force value by simulating the urban development and verifying the feasibility of the CA model with statistical analysis of the existing urban data. Finally, we select Shanghai as an example to conduct the quantitative empirical study, and summarize the modeling trend of urban agglomeration evolution. The purpose is to propose a feasible model for further study of evolution and to provide new ideas of the urban agglomeration evolution.