Calibrating Metronamica Land Use Simulation Model for Colombo, Sri Lanka

Cellular Automata (CA) urban simulation models are widely used to explore the complexities associated with urban systems due to their simplicity, flexibility and intuitiveness, and particularly because of its ability to incorporate the spatial and temporal dimensions of the processes. This study is placed in a context where the current planning practices in Sri Lanka are in need of such robust methods and versatile techniques to comprehend land uses in rapidly growing urban areas. Metronamica is a broadly used cellular automata based modeling application that is capable of explore such land use dynamics. This paper present the findings of calibrating Metronamica urban simulation model for Colombo Metropolitan area in Sri Lanka. 1987 is taken as the base year of the calibration and 1987-2007 is considered as the calibration period. Eleven cell states are defined in the study while 100m x 100m is taken as the cell size of the model. Calibration results are analyzed through the visual comparison, contingency table and kappa statistics