Patterns of land use and transportation play a critical role in determining the economic vitality, livability, and sustainability of urban areas. Transportation interacts strongly with land use: different kinds of transportation systems induce different patterns of land use, while at the same time, different kinds of land use induce demands for different kinds of transportation systems. Both have significant environmental effects. This integrated research program will support the construction and deployment of sophisticated models of land use, transportation, and environmental impact. The goal is to provide tools for stakeholders, such as urban planners, government staff, and citizens' groups, to help predict future patterns of urban development under different possible scenarios over periods of twenty or more years, allowing them to make more informed choices. Anticipated scientific advances include: in human-computer interaction, more effective ways of understanding the results from and interacting with complex simulations, and ways of linking stakeholder values with design choices in simulations and their interfaces; in graphics, capabilities for producing simulated street-level animations of urban environments from a policy-driven simulation; and in software engineering, new software structures that allow us to design, integrate, and evolve complex and diverse urban submodels.
