Simulating urban growth by integrating landscape expansion index (LEI) and cellular automata

Traditional urban cellular automata (CA) model can effectively simulate infilling and edge-expansion growth patterns. However, most of these models are incapable of simulating the outlying growth. This paper proposed a novel model called LEI-CA which incorporates landscape expansion index (LEI) with CA to simulate urban growth. Urban growth type is identified by calculating the LEI index of each cell. Case-based reasoning technique is used to discover different transition rules for the adjacent growth type and the outlying growth type, respectively. We applied the LEI-CA model to the simulation of urban growth in Dongguan in southern China. The comparison between logistic-based CA and LEI-CA indicates that the latter can yield a better performance. The LEI-CA model can improve urban simulation accuracy over logistic-based CA by 13.8%, 10.8% and 6.9% in 1993, 1999 and 2005, respectively. Moreover, the outlying growth type hardly exists in the simulation by logistic-based CA, while the proposed LEI-CA model performs well in simulating different urban growth patterns. Our experiments illustrate that the LEI-CA model not only overcomes the deficiencies of traditional CA but might also better understand urban evolution process.