An Agent-Based Modelling Framework for Urban Agriculture

Abstract

Agricultural innovation is imperative in order to meet global challenges to sustainably feed large urban populations. This paper contributes a modelling framework for urban agriculture, and an implementation in a scenario based on the fast growing mega city of Shenzhen located near Hong Kong in southern China. We also review related work and provide a gap analysis between requirements for modelling modern urban agricultural systems versus related work that looks at agricultural supply chains, production, and land use. The proposed framework will facilitate developing a novel decision support system to coordinate decentralized urban agricultural production units in order to realize, at scale, numerous benefits from co-locating production and consumption in the urban environment.