A Flexible IT Infrastructure for Integrated Urban Planning

Abstract

This paper presents an IT infrastructure based on an event driven architecture with the objective to decrease the turnaround time for urban planning. Most urban planning takes a long time, not only to get all stakeholders involved, but also to assess various scenarios on several aspects according to (inter)national laws and regulations. By supporting urban planning with IT, the turnaround time is expected to decrease dramatically and supports the possibility to explore more scenarios without an extra burden on duration and personnel. The IT infrastructure developed integrates various data resources and calculation models for analyzing different scenarios. An event service bus and a data store for sharing data between computational models is the basis of the infrastructure. Various computational models are able to read and write to the data store and publish and subscribe to events. Based on a case study, the paper illustrates that indeed decision making is improved leading to better and possibly cheaper urban plans for all relevant stakeholders. The paper will also show that a closed environment, as currently available, is one of the major thresholds for acceptance by end-users. End-users would like to apply their computational models, which can not yet be plugged into the infrastructure. Further extensions are foreseen in applying open standards and open link data for data collection and sharing. Thus, interoperability is a prerequisite for our IT infrastructure.