Multi-Agent-Based Urban Vegetation Design.

Ahmed Khairadeen Ali,Eun Seok Kim,One Jae Lee,Haneen Hashim Mohammed Ali,Hayub Song

doi:10.3390/ijerph17093075

Ahmed Khairadeen Ali, Eun Seok Kim + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17093075

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Abstract

Urban vegetation is an essential element of the urban city pedestrian walkway. Despite city forest regulations and urban planning best practices, vegetation planning lacks clear comprehension and compatibility with other urban elements surrounding it. Urban planners and academic researchers currently devote vital attention to include most of the urban elements and their impact on the occupants and the environment in the planning stage of urban development. With the advancement in computational design, they have developed various algorithms to generate design alternatives and measure their impact on the environment that meets occupants’ needs and perceptions of their city. In particular, multi-agent-based simulations show great promise in developing rule compliance with urban vegetation design tools. This paper proposed an automatic urban vegetation city rule compliance approach for pedestrian pathway vegetation, leveraging multi-agent system and algorithmic modeling tools. This approach comprises three modules: rule compliance (T-Rule), street vegetation design tool (T-Design), and multi-agent alternative generation (T-Agent). Notably, the scope of the paper is limited to trees, shrubbery, and seating area configurations in the urban pathway context. To validate the developed design tool, a case study was tested, and the vegetation design tool generated the expected results successfully. A questionnaire was conducted to give feedback on the use of the developed tool for enhancing positive experience of the developed tool. It is anticipated that the proposed tool has the potential to aid urban planners in decision-making and develop more practical vegetation planting plans compared with the conventional Two-Dimensional (2D) plans, and give the city occupants the chance to take part in shaping their city by merely selecting from predefined parameters in a user interface to generate their neighborhood pathway vegetation plans. Moreover, this approach can be extended to be embedded in an interactive map where city occupants can shape their neighborhood greenery and give feedback to urban planners for decision-making.

Highlights

As cities improve and expectations for everyday comforts increase, urban residents solicit higher standards for personal satisfaction and lodging conditions, creating more appeal to arrange and structure cities [1,2,3,4]
This paper proposes a bottom-up approach for automatic modeling of pathway vegetation in urban contexts, in compliance with city planning regulations, environmental requirements, and best practices, by utilizing visual programming and generative design technologies
A multi-agent system urban vegetation design tool was developed and successfully tested with a pilot study that provided the intuition of how one design parameter in an urban context can affect the output generation and the behavior of the system

Summary

Introduction

As cities improve and expectations for everyday comforts increase, urban residents solicit higher standards for personal satisfaction and lodging conditions, creating more appeal to arrange and structure cities [1,2,3,4]. Urban tree planting offers a viable way to improve the weather comfort conditions in the climate-proof cities, especially in high-density compact neighborhoods [5], and reduce carbon emissions and its sequestration [6,7,8]. Tree planting on the street faces difficult challenges to grow compared with trees planted in the parks [9]. Street trees are subject to stresses due. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 3075; doi:10.3390/ijerph17093075 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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