Dear Tom Hackbarth,

I have recently submitted an article on urban simulation based on CA-MARKOV Approach . So, you can use CA-MARKOV Approach to predict the future urban development surface if the land is flat or plain terrain. For that, you have to generate a future suitable probable surface based on current year using AHP (MCDM) techniques. Thus you can create a base map and a projected map of the same year. In this way you can predict upward trends of urban growth. IDRISI Selva 17.2/ 18.0 software (open source) should be the best software to do the simulation of land use land cover. Best wishes with regards.

For your better understanding, please follow the link given below.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303243411002091

Dear Mr Mallick,

thanks for the quick reply. I will look into your publication right away!

Hi Tom, the Seto Lab (https://urbanization.yale.edu/) has done quite a bit of work on forecasting urban land expansion (see here for their most recent publication Article Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island inten...