ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the case study and the Dinamica EGO model, including a detailed description of the methods used to define transition rules and the evaluation criteria used to estimate the goodness-of-fit of the produced land use and land cover (LULC) changes. Originally used in regional economics, land use change models, particularly urban growth models, attempt to mimic historical and future LULC transitions in a spatially explicit manner. A major driver for urban growth has been the proximity to the central business district and to other more local urban clusters. To estimate the performance of the memetic algorithm optimized calibration, a baseline was created by applying a 'standard' genetic algorithm using the previously described setup with a population size of 32. Yet, the observed reduction in the computational costs increases the usability of the calibration method for extensive case study areas at a high resolution.
