The Needs and Trends of Urban Simulation Platforms- A Review

Half of the global population lives in cities, and it is still increasing as people are moving to cities in search of better education, job opportunities, and so on. The existing infrastructures of the cities are being stretched beyond their capacity and requirements for well-organized urban environment and efficient urban management are rising. Urban simulation platforms create opportunities to review and analyze complex urban scenarios and help authorities in effective and efficient decision-making. The recent advancement in information and communication technologies (ICT) and data-driven environments have even aggravated the use of such platforms. To understand the current trend of the developed urban simulation platforms and to investigate the needs for future platforms, this study reviews academic research papers that focus on the subject area. From the findings of the study, it is observed that most of the developed simulation platforms focus on short-term analysis and cover specific sectors. Also, there exist merely few city-level deployment cases of such platforms. To this end, this study emphasizes the needs for multi-disciplinary, scalable, expendable, open and interactive simulation platforms for the development and management of future cities.