Procedural city layout generation based on urban land use models

Training and simulation applications in virtual worlds require significant amounts of urban environments. Procedural generation is an efficient way to create such models. Existing approaches for procedural modelling of cities aim at facilitating the work of urban planners and artists, but either require expert knowledge or external input data to generate results that resemble real-life cities, or they have long computation times, and thus are unsuitable for non-experts such as training instructors. We propose a method that procedurally creates layouts of structurally plausible cities from high-level, intuitive user input such as city size, location and historic background. The resulting layouts consist of different kinds of city districts which are arranged using constraints derived from established models of urban land use. Our approach avoids the need for external expert engagement in the creation process, and allows for the generation of large city layouts in seconds, making it significantly faster than comparable agent-based software and thus supporting the needs of non-expert creators of virtual cities for many applications.

@InProceedings { GSKB09,
  author       = "Groenewegen, Saskia A. and Smelik, Ruben M. and Kraker, Klaas Jan de  and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Procedural city layout generation based on urban land use models",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of Eurographics 2009 - Short papers",
  pages        = "45--48",
  month        = "mar",
  year         = "2009",
  address      = "Munich, Germany",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2009/GSKB09"
}