ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to compare different applications of dynamic models of urban systems, to show their respective advantages and disadvantages, and to analyse how they can be coupled with geographic information systems. Dynamic models are of great utility in understanding the evolution of urban systems. Associating determinism and random fluctuations, continuity and bifurcations, stability and dramatic structural change, they offered an ideal conceptual framework for analysing the evolution of urban systems. Dynamic models derived from synergetics have been applied in geography to describe the evolution of the population in inter-regional and inter-urban systems. Models developed in synergetics are built up in a quite different way and most of those applied in social science are based on a master equation approach which focuses on the integration of the individual and the aggregate levels. Calibration and validation are important aspects of model-building.
