CitySIM – Agent-Based System for Modelling and Simulating Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems for Collaborative Governance

Cities are complex entities that consists of many systems that interact with one another. Cities are expected to grow in size and diversity, face diminishing resources, climate decay, which all pose challenges to the governance of cities. These call for new ways of understanding cities and innovative approaches to simulate cities and their sub-systems. Complex Adaptive Systems have been used to describe and create simulation models of cities. This paper presents an agent-based model of a city, CitySim, which focuses on how traffic in the city evolves as various entities within the city change. The main research question this paper addresses is how could we create a model of a city as a Complex Adaptive System? The CitySim model was created using the Design Science Research Method. The benefits and challenges of the model are described through simulation experiments using the model.