The following sample is a write-up of a lab assignment written by me in the GIS and Landscape Modeling course in the fall of 2014 at the University of Connecticut. The lab involved examining the growth of a hypothetical city around an initially-given city center, namely the effects of decisions made by new residents (the “agents” in this agent-based model) on growth patterns. The model’s settings with which I experimented in this lab included:

• The importance that new residents attach to a location’s aesthetic qualities versus proximity to services (shopping, entertainment, schools, etc.);
• The number of locations (cells in the model) that each resident has a chance to examine before deciding where in the study area to reside (“numtests” in the report); and
• Whether new development adversely affects landscape (i.e., the aesthetic qualities of adjacent cells).

The model was run multiple times with different combinations of settings. Besides the settings described above, a model can potentially have many more, but no experiments were carried out with these.

The agent-based model was created in a modeling environment called NetLogo, a tool for modeling phenomena such as landscape changes by means of a multi-agent approach. Written in the Logo language, NetLogo has been developed since 1999 at Northwestern University. More information about it can be found on the university’s website.

NetLogo lab report