Urban Growth Prediction in Mumbai Metropolitan Region using SLEUTH
SLEUTH is a globally used algorithm for urban growth prediction.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is among the most densely populated and economically significant region for the country to emerge on the world economic scenario. Hence, the urban growth for the MMR is projected for the next four decades, separately using roads, railways and projected transport linkages, for the Landsat images from 1971 to 2011classified using ecognition software from Trimble. While the first scenario with roads alone is created using the Urban Growth Model (UGM), the latter two scenarios have been created using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) that substantially reduces the computing time.
However, herein it is presumed that the same algorithm may be effective to predict urban growth along road and rail linkages. On the other hand, considering only roads may not give a very realistic projection for a city where a substantial number of trips are covered by the suburban/ metro rail. Moreover, a considerable number of transport links have been added in the last decade, specifically the second port, the upcoming airport on the mainland and the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL) connecting the island city. It would therefore be interesting to figure out how these growth projections would vary with the addition of the new road and railway corridors replacing the coarse resolution images of 1971 with the medium resolution images for 2021.
