I need to get software capable of running models of cellular automata or multi-agent systems to simulate urban growth. Preferably free and if they support in ArcGIS environment better. The aim is to analyze their applicability to simulate urban growth in Argentine cities.
I have seen some people trying NetLogo or Python as the platforms.
You can try TerraME. Look these links...
http://www.terrame.org/doku.php
http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/terrame_ems_post_print.pdf
I like the extensive work done by Chris Batty. Links for book and site below
Other links related to implementations in Mathematica
http://www.fractalcities.org/
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-8/graph-and-network-analysis/study-urban-road-networks.html
It depends on what you are looking for. If you are comfortable with programming or want to learn Java, a framework such as MASON (http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/) could be useful. But it for general agent-based models, not specifically for cities. Repast is another option (http://repast.sourceforge.net/). These are similar to the idea of NetLogo as was suggested above, but specific to agent-based modeling unlike Python. For cellular automata I previously used MATLAB, but it is very expensive. You could code a cellular automata model in any of the agent-based frameworks though, you just have to be careful how you define the behaviors.
Something called SIMLANDER, that implements a cellular automata model of land use in R.
https://simlander.wordpress.com/
I personally choose to use NetLogo. It is free, has a large users' community, and dozens of examples. For someone who has no programming background, I found NetLogo's language is intuitive. In the past, I tried ABM plug in for ArcGIS but I left it, as (1) I had a problem to install it + to continuously deal with the changing sub-versions or ArcGIS and Java, (2) I found, it has limited uses and flexibility. NetLogo is not without limitation though. The newest version 6, has a bit of change in some codes. Thus code written in NetLogo 5 might be working in 6. Plus, at the moment, the users community who use NetLogo 6 is not that much compare to 5. So you would expect to get a slower response or no one dealing with the problem before on the net.
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