Designing Future Cities – LakeSIM Integrated Design Tool For Assessing Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Urban Scale Conceptual Designs

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48 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
BERGERSON ET AL
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
LakeSIM INTEGRATED DESIGN TOOL
FOR ASSESSING SHORT- AND
LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF URBAN
SCALE CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS
JOSHUA BERGERSON · RALPH T. MUEHLEISEN
BO RODDA · JOSHUA A. AULD · LEAH B. GUZOWSKI
JONATHAN OZIK · NICHOLSON COLLIER

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 49
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
INTRODUCTION
Researchers at the United States Department
of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are
working with local developers to create the
Lakeside Sustainable Infrastructure Model
(LakeSIM), a sophisticated computer program
which might change the way the detailed plan-
ning and design of cities is performed.
The traditional planning approach called for
a series of investigations which generally in-
cluded: 1. Identification of the general program
for the city or project; 2. Analysis of the site; 3.
Identification of the infrastructure, housing and
service requirements; 4. Initial design of the pro-
ject; 5. Identification of implementation phases;
and, 6. Detailed site design and engineering by
phase. The first five steps in this approach are
intended to investigate a limited number of city
design, infrastructure and service alternatives in
a sequential and reductive manner. The goal of
the first five steps is to dictate the organization
and composition of each construction phase.
Currently the job of the last step is to fine tune
the design elements and engineer them to the
actual site.
However, the inability to conduct detailed,
designed, and engineered examinations of a
large number of alternatives at this final de-
tailed design and engineering step can produce
unintended outcomes such as expensive long
term operating costs or the need to later re-
generate sections of the project due to climate
Rendering of Lakeside Development.
Courtesy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

50 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
BERGERSON ET AL
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
1950 1975 2000 2015
Number of Million Plus Population Cities
Growth of Large Cities
Asia
Africa
Latin America and
the Caribbean
Europe
North America
0
100
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600
1950 1975 2000 2015
Number of Million Plus Population Cities
Growth of Large Cities
Asia
Africa
Latin America and
the Caribbean
Europe
North America
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1950 1975 2000 2015
Number of Million Plus Population Cities
Growth of Large Cities
Asia
Africa
Latin America and
the Caribbean
Europe
North America
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100
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300
400
500
600
1950 1975 2000 2015
Number of Million Plus Population Cities
Growth of Large Cities
Asia
Africa
Latin America and
the Caribbean
Europe
North America
Figure 1: Growth of million plus population cities by continent
changes impacts or emerging technological ad-
vances. The use of LakeSIM might revolutionize
this final step.
LakeSIM is being developed as a tool to help
professionals understand the short and long
term effects of various design aspects by mod-
eling the highly complex interdependencies be-
tween the various major infrastructural systems
while still allowing designers to visualize the
aesthetics of the urban environment in a 3-D
modeling platform. Its capability to evaluate
“what if” scenarios, including infrastructure sys-
tem interactions, will be particularly important
when evaluating design alternatives and trying
to allocate limited resources while maintaining
high levels of sustainability. To date, it quickly
performs analysis of energy and transportation
impacts so that the advantages and constraints
of different build-out scenarios can be quanti-
fied. Plans have been formed to expand the an-
alysis to include the analysis of energy supply,
water, and other systems.
The need for such a tool is great as more and
more cities are being developed. A hundred
years ago, one out of every five people lived in
urban areas. By 2050, that number will balloon
to over four out of five.
1
While tools like LakeSIM
have utility in slower growing areas of the world
(see the following case study), they could be
most useful in regions where increasing urban-
ization is occurring. At the start of the twentieth
century, 16 cities in the world had populations of
one million or more, nearly all of which were in
either Europe or North America.
2
In 1950, 72 cit-
ies in the world boasted one million plus popula-
tions, and this ballooned to 195 by 1975 and
nearly 400 by 2000. The number of million plus
population cities was projected to reach nearly
550 by 2015, with the majority of these new mil-
lion plus population cities in Africa and Asia as
seen in Figure 1.
Accommodating this growth in an urban set-
ting will require the provision of energy, trans-
portation, potable water, food and other infra-
structure services that strain finite resources.
Furthermore, existing infrastructure will require
not only continued expansion, but complete re-
design in certain situations, especially with an
eye towards environmental concerns related to
water and energy consumption, pollution, and
carbon emissions. The application of design
tools, like the one described in this article, could
result in substantial energy savings, reduced car-
bon emissions and water consumption, and more
effective use of resources in addition to reduced
construction costs due to improved engineering.

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 51
Figure 2: Aerial photographs of the South Works site from 1938 during a time of high steel production and 1998
several years after closing.
Source: For the 1938 aerial - Illinois Historical Aerial Photography 1937-1947 Database, Illinois Natural Resources Geospatial Data Clearinghouse,
Illinois State Geological Survey, http://isgs.illinois.edu/nsdihome/webdocs/ilhap/ (Last accessed April 21, 2015).For the 1998 aerial - 1998-2001
Illinois Digital Orthophoto Quadrangle Data Database, Illinois Natural Resources Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, Illinois State Geological Survey,
http://isgs.illinois.edu/nsdihome/webdocs/doqs/ (Last accessed April 21, 2015)

52 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
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CASE STUDY: CHICAGO
LAKESIDE DEVELOPMENT
At present, LakeSIM is being used to facilitate
the design of a project located 9 miles south
of downtown Chicago, in the USA. The Chi-
cago Lakeside Development, led by develop-
ers McCaffery Interests, aims to redevel-
op the 600 acre brownfield site of a former
steel mill with a robust mixed use develop-
ment program.
Site History
In 1880, the North Chicago Rolling Company
purchased 75 acres at the mouth of the Calu-
met River on Lake Michigan to optimize the
cost effectiveness of shipping raw materi-
als required for the steel production process.
3
Throughout its operation the plant grew in size
as the mill dumped steel slag into Lake Mich-
igan and slowly expanded the site to near-
ly 600 acres
4
. After over a century of oper-
ation and multiple name changes, the U.S.
Steel South Works site shut down operations
in 1992. At the peak of operation, the mill em-
ployed more than 20,000 and was one of the
main sources of prosperity for the south side
of Chicago. Figure 2 is a set of aerial photos
taken in 1938 when output was fairly high and
1998, six years after closing. As seen in the
1998 photo, nearly all the buildings have been
demolished and removed from the site.
In preparation of redevelopment of the site,
U.S. Steel spent over $7M in environmental
remediation as part of the Illinois EPA Site Re-
mediation Program
5
. In 2010 the City of Chi-
cago created a Tax Incremental Financing (TIF)
district to support infrastructure develop-
ment at the site and recently completed ex-
tension of the historic Lakeshore Drive (U.S.
Highway 41) further south, so that it now bi-
sects the site and is finishing an interchange
improvement to Interstate 90 to further im-
prove access to the site.
This site presents a unique opportunity due
to its proximity to downtown Chicago, Lake
Michigan, and the Calumet River, the scale
of the site, as well as the absence of exist-
ing infrastructure. Lakeside is a massive blank
canvas and a fantastic potential to be a hotbed
of innovative urban design.
Lakeside Development
Today, the 600 acre site is in the master plan-
ning stage. Called “The Chicago Lakeside De-
velopment”, it was conceived by develop-
ers McCaffery Interests and aims to revitalize
Chicago’s south side by bringing new ser-
vices, jobs, and residences to a dilapidated,
unserved area in the third largest city in the
United States of America. The largest impacts
to the immediate neighborhood will be an in-
flux of service and construction jobs, as well
as bringing grocery stores to an area where
food stores are very limited. The program calls
for the construction of 13,500 residential units
accommodated by single family dwellings and
multifamily mid- and high-rise units. It also
envisions the development of 17,500,000 SF
of retail space and the construction of near-
ly 125 acre of public park space and bike paths,
along with a 1,500-slip boat marina. This will
not only promote a green urban environment,
extending the public park land found along
Lake Michigan throughout Chicago, but will
also restore the natural beauty of the site.
With a build-out of approximately 30 years,
the total cost of the project is estimated to
be $4 Billion.
Unfortunately, the sheer size of the de-
velopment also presents several challenges.
For decades, urban planners and developers
have relied upon intuition to guide their deci-
sion-making process. But this “sixth sense” is
significantly less effective for larger-scale de-
velopments where hundreds of buildings and
dozens of interconnected services will res-
ide over the course of decades. Realizing the

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 53
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
Python .ism
to CGA Tool
Python Building
Export Tool
City Engine
Building
Description
File (.ism)
Weather File
(.epw)
EECalc (.ism)
Building Energy
Simulation
EECalc Building
Templates
EECalc Results
Database
City Engine CGA Rule Files
Generic Buiding Reference Rule Files
Commercial
Building CGA
Residential
Building CGA
New Primary
School Building
CGA)
New Hotel High
Rise Building
(CGA)
City Engine CGA Rule Files
Site, Zoning, and Visualization Rule Files
Zoning and Lot
Specications CGA
Visualization CGA
Building
Construction CGA
Road
Construction CGA
Additional External Site Information
Building
Footprints
(AutoCad)
Existing Roads
and Buildings
Site Plan and
Zoning (AutoCad)
Report
Figure 3: Flow diagram for the LakeSIM building energy prediction workflow
grand scale complexities of this project, Mc-
Caffery Interests have partnered with re-
searchers to develop a tool to facilitate this
large scale urban design.
LakeSIM – Initially Focused
on Energy Efficiency
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne Na-
tional Laboratory and the University of Chi-
cago, through a partnership with the Chica-
go-based architectural and engineering design
firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and the Clean
Energy Trust, are developing tools that merge
urban design with scientific analysis to improve
the decision-making process associated with
large-scale urban developments. One such
tool, called Lakeside Sustainable Infrastructure
Model, or LakeSIM, has been prototyped with
an initial focus on consumer-driven energy and
transportation demand. LakeSIM sprang from
the need to answer practical questions about
urban design and planning, requiring a better
understanding of the long-term impacts of
design decisions on energy and transportation
demands for the Chicago Lakeside Develop-
ment project.
To address the uncertainty of large-scale
planning with so many complex variables,
LakeSIM creators have prototyped a new
platform that seeks to help developers plan
at massive scales while anticipating the abil-
ity to build in future scenarios such as climate
change, improved efficiency in buildings and
transportation systems, and increased renew-
able energy and/or micro-grid applications. To
date, the majority of the work on LakeSIM has
been integrating energy modeling software for
analyzing demand side energy requirements
and transportation impacts based on proposed
city planning.
LakeSIM employs the specifications of doz-
ens of building design types supplied by the
Department of Energy and Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill. Each building type features unique

54 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
BERGERSON ET AL
April.2013 I Skidmore,Owings & Merrill LLPChicago Lakeside Development, LLCI McCaf ery Interests, Inc. I U.S.Steel Corp.
LAKESHORE DRIVE
RAINBOW
PARK
83
RD
STREET
81
ST
STREET
79
TH
STREET
87
TH
STREET
89
TH
STREET
COMMERCE AVENUE
EUNEVAYELRU
B
ORE
WA L L
PARK
91
ST
STREET
CALUMET
PARK
LAKE MICHIGAN
CALUMET RIVER
CENTRAL
PARK
NORTH
SLIP B
2025-2030
15 A CRES / 5 M GSF
NORTH
SLIP A
2022-2025
9ACRES /3M GSF
RES B
2017-2019
8 ACRES
.75 M GSF
RES C
2020-2025
45 ACRES / 5.6 M GSF
ORE WALL B
2025-2030
17 ACRES / 1.7 M GSF
ORE WALL A
2015-2017
7ACRES /1.2M GSF
MARINA
HOUSING
2020-2025
22 ACRES / 2.6 M GSF
INNOVATION
DISTRICT 2
2017-2020
12 ACRES / 2.1 M GSF
INNOVATION
DISTRICT 1
2015-2017
11 ACRES / 1.5 M GSF
INNOVATION
DISTRICT 3
2020-2025
12 ACRES / 1.0 M GSF
RIVER HOUSING
2020-2025
9ACRES /1.4M GSF
CI VIC
CENTER
2025
5 ACRES
MARINA
2030
MARKET
COMMONS
PHASE 1 2015-2017
PHASE 2 2025-2035
51 ACRES / 11 M GSF
LAK ESHORE
C ORRIDOR A
2017-2022
18 ACRES / 3.8 M GSF
RES A
2015-2017
12 A CRES
2 M GSF
CHARTE R
HIGH SCHOOL
2018
13 A CRES
LAK ESHORE
C ORRIDOR B
2020-2030
14 ACRES / 1.5 M GSF
ADVANCED
MANUFACTURING 1
2015-2017
7 ACRES / .8 M GSF
CI VIC
CENTER
2017-2020
ADVANCED
MANUFACTURING 2
2020-2025
14 ACRES / 1.7 M GSF
COMMUNITY
PARK
NORTH SLIP
MARINA
2015
LAK EFRONT
PARK
2015
LAK ESHORE
DRIVE
2013
Mixed Use
Residential
Innovation District
Advanced Manufacturing
Civic
Open Space
Primary Lan d Use
Total GFA 49 M GSF
N
0
200’ 400’ 800’
Figure 4: Site plan as imported into CityEngine

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 55
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
Figure 5: Basic 3D rendering from site plan
Figure 6: The LakeSIM model includes details such a zoning information (shown by colors), sidewalks, bike lanes, parking, greenspace, etc.
in addition to basic road and building information
Figure 7: Zoning envelopes are created to let the designers know the maximum building size that can be allowed on the site

56 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
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descriptive parameters, allowing designers
to pick and choose different types and place
these in a virtual site map. With an emphasis
on integrating scientific and engineering mod-
els into platforms used by industry, the pro-
ject selected CityEngine, from Environment-
al Systems Research Institute (ESRI), as the
“dashboard” through which the urban designer
interacts with the city designs. Computation-
al models can be invoked to analyze changes
with respect to energy demand over time. Fig-
ure 3 shows the LakeSIM workflow diagram for
computing building energy use.
The future goal of this virtual map is to cre-
ate an interconnected virtual city where chan-
ges to plans can be analyzed in minutes or
hours instead of weeks, allowing planners to
refine and monitor development progress as
individual buildings aggregate into zones, and
zones aggregate into residential and commer-
cial neighborhoods. With this in mind, one of
the most important sectors where LakeSIM
hopes to assist in decision-making is energy.
The use of LakeSIM is fairly straightforward.
First the basic site plan is imported into CityEn-
gine and divided into all its components: road
networks, building types and sizes, etc., along
with expected construction dates as shown
in Figure 4 and rendered in 3D to better vis-
ualize buildings as shown in Figure 5. This al-
lows designers to more easily make changes to
building sizes, types, locations, etc. The basic
LakeSIM model can include things like side
walk size, bike lanes, setbacks, parking spaces,
medians, greenspace, etc. as shown in Figure 6.
Designers can then use several built in vis-
ualizations to help them understand the basic
design and design options as a function of
time. One such visualization is zoning “envel-
opes” which help designers understand the
maximum building size of the building on each
lot as shown in Figure 7.
The information about the site and buildings
is parametric as much as possible. A building is
described by its type, basic shape, size, occu-
pant density, hours of operation, basic building
mechanical and lighting systems, basic materi-
als, and some desired design constraints such
as window-to-wall ratio. Designers can then
quickly look at variations in the design through
parameter changes. For example, changing the
building size will change its total occupancy,
number of units, size of mechanical systems,
etc. Changing its shape would change the total
area of windows.
Once the built environment has been virtu-
ally designed, the program evaluates energy
efficiency. The electric and gas power stream-
ing into residences and businesses is a balanced
coordination between energy suppliers and
energy producers. To provide planners with
better energy demand forecasts throughout
the life of the development, LakeSIM employs
an Energy Performance Standard Calculation
Toolkit, called EECalc, developed by Argonne
and based on the ISO 13790 standards for pre-
dicting energy performance of buildings.
EECalc generates monthly estimates of a
building’s thermal energy demand, and energy
consumption for heating, cooling, lighting, and
appliance plug loads. As each structure has
unique architectural features, they also have
unique energy demands. EECalc uses analytics
that are faster, less expensive, and less data-
intensive compared to conventional building
energy simulation methods which allows for
rapid calculation of both “what if” scenarios as
well as generating uncertainty and sensitivity
analyses.
As LakeSIM calculates the interconnected-
ness between each part of the plan, users can
make systematic changes and see how this af-
fects energy demand and supply for the indi-
vidual building, block, or for the entire region.
A typical energy analysis might compare the
energy use intensity (EUI), the zoning informa-
tion, the building areas, and the total energy
use for a section of Lakeside at a particular

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 57
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
0.0
10.0
20.0
30.0
40.0
2020 2025 2030 2035 2040 2045 2050
GWh
Year
Lakeside Total Site Energy Use for Various Development Scenarios
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
2014 2016 2018 2020 2022 2024 2026 2028 2030
GWh
Year
Lakeside Energy Demand with Climate Uncertainty
Figure 8: CityEngine Lakeside site visualization at one snapshot in time. Buildings colored by usage and type (top left), total area (top right),
energy utilization index (bottom left), and total consumption (bottom right)
Figure 9: Total Lakeside
Development site energy
demand for various
development scenarios
Figure 10: Prediction of
future energy demand for
a particular design scenario
including the effects of
weather uncertainty.
The most likely energy
demand is in yellow and the
shaded surrounding region
represents the uncertainty
related to climate

58 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
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POLARIS: Agent Based Transportation Simulation System
14
Person
Activity
Generation
Activity
Scheduling
Activity
Planning
Route Choice
Traveler
Movements
Activity Planning
Link
Simulation
Intersection
Simulation
Traffic Management
Center
ITS
Infrastructure
Person
Network
ITS Responses
Network
Monitoring
Information
Dissemination
ITS Response
Strategies
Figure 11: POLARIS simulation framework. Some of the decision processes that are modeled for travelers and traffic
managers are shown in the thought clouds for those agents
Figure 12: Screen capture of the Chicago regional transportation model in POLARIS that is used to understand the mutual
impacts of Lakeside and the regional transportation system. The Lakeside Development site is only a small part of the
area in the small red box near the center of the figure

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 59
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
snapshot in time as shown in Figure 8. Here we
see a combination of four different visualiz-
ations for the same moment in time that are
often compared to understand some of the
tradeoffs in the design. Shown are the build-
ing type, building area, EUI, and the total build-
ing energy use for the year. A designer would
look at the EUI and the total building energy
use to understand the sustainability impacts
and expected fuel costs for the buildings while
the total area tells the designer about general
costs. Building type information helps the de-
signer quickly consider what types of alterna-
tive buildings could be placed in a particular lo-
cation if the EUI, total energy, or building size
are not to the liking of the designer.
LakeSIM is particularly well suited to study-
ing various development scenarios. Figure 9
shows an example of using LakeSIM to evalu-
ate several different development scenarios.
The scenarios start with a total demand ranging
from 3 GWh to 9 GWh but by 2050 the differ-
ing scenarios range from 12 GWh to 40 GWh.
Perhaps most powerfully, LakeSIM can also
answer “what if” questions, such as “what if”
the climate warms and weather becomes more
extreme. Figure 10 shows an example of the
uncertainty in energy use for a given scen-
ario when uncertainty from weather is taken
into account. In the plot, the total site energy
demand for one particular scenario is plotted
while the weather is allowed to change. The
yellow line is a plot of the scenario run with
“normal” weather throughout the lifetime of
the scenario. The lower bound of the plot re-
sults from assuming that future weather will
be mild (mild winters and summers with few
extreme weather events). The upper bound of
the plot results from assuming future weather
years will be more extreme (warmer summers,
colder winters, and more extreme weather
events). The uncertainty in future weather re-
sults in nearly a 15% uncertainty in the future
energy demand prediction for the year 2030
(e.g. the projected annual demand is 734 GWh
for extreme weather compared to 650 GWh for
mild weather which is an increase of about 15%).
Improvements to LakeSIM
Transportation Impacts
More recent work on LakeSIM has been fo-
cused on integrating a transportation model-
ing software into the program. To facilitate the
assessment of proposed transportation infra-
structure, LakeSIM contains the Planning and
Operations Language for Agent-based Region-
al Integrated Simulation (POLARIS) trans-
portation system modeling suite, developed
at Argonne National Laboratory under con-
tract with the Federal Highway Administra-
tion (FHWA)
6
. The work encompasses the de-
velopment of new tools for creating integrated,
interoperable, and extensible model systems to
address new transportation management and
operations policies. The development of PO-
LARIS focused on enabling three major research
directions: agent-based modeling, infrastruc-
ture design for traffic management centers and
intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and
software engineering techniques.
The use of agent based modeling (ABM)
for all decision processes is a key innovation
in POLARIS. Agents are used to encapsulate a
set of behaviors that govern their interaction
with the environment and other agents. With-
in POLARIS, agents are used to model anything
that interacts with the transportation system
and makes decisions including animate objects
such travelers, traffic managers, and transit au-
thorities, but also the reactive inanimate ob-
jects that make up the bulk of the transporta-
tion network. The basic simulation framework
is shown in Figure 11.
The resulting software framework has been
used to develop an activity-based travel de-
mand model and traffic simulation for the Chi-
cago region, which simulates the activity-trav-
el needs and travel experiences of 10 million in-

60 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
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Figure 13. Close-up view of the Lakeside development in the POLARIS regional simulation. New residential buildings are shown in blue while
attraction sites such as shopping or socializing are shaown in red and green. The individual vehicles modeled by POLARIS can be seen in the figure

ISOCARP · REVIEW 11 61
DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
dividual traveler agents over a typical day as
they interact with the transportation system.
The Lakeside Development has been incorpor-
ated into the baseline Chicago regional trans-
portation model in order to evaluate the trans-
portation impacts of the proposed develop-
ment. The enhanced Chicago regional model
then serves as a platform to test new policies
to improve transportation service in the area.
The model can be used to analyze a wide range
of transportation policies, from signal timing
updates, roadway improvements, transit pro-
vision, etc., all the way to advanced solutions
such as autonomous shared vehicle fleets.
The full model region is shown in the POLAR-
IS screen capture shown in Figure 12. To under-
stand the scale of the transportation model
note that the Lakeside Development site is a
small part of the small red box near the center
of the Figure. The Chicago regional transpor-
tation model in POLARIS is not just a high level
model of traffic flow on major streets and high-
ways but is a detailed model that goes down to
the individual building and vehicle level. As can
be seen in Figure 13, POLARIS represents both
new residential housing (the blue buildings) for
a simulated population of new residents as well
as new activity attractors (red and green build-
ings) which will generate trips from both the
new population as well as the surrounding area.
Proposed Improvements to LakeSIM
Future work on LakeSIM will aim to incorporate
supply side energy modeling and analysis, in-
cluding electric and gas grids (in order to assist
in energy infrastructure planning), and water
systems (water distribution, waste water, and
storm water) to assist in both storm water and
sewer infrastructure planning. As Lakeside De-
velopment aims to incorporate large scale re-
newable energy systems, the demand side
energy modeling and transportation modeling
currently developed in LakeSIM will be critic-
al for analyzing supply side energy systems as
the buildings and transportation sectors com-
bined encompass the majority of the future
energy demand for the site. The LakeSIM mod-
el is expected to help answer questions related
to the incorporation of distributed renewable
generation such as wind and solar, the possible
use of local power generation from waste heat
or using micro-turbines, the use of distribut-
ed and centralized electricity storage, and the
design of electric micro-grids. The models will
be closely coupled so changes in demand that
arise from changes in proposed building design
and occupancy will be reflected in the energy
supply and water system models.
In addition to adding additional infrastruc-
ture elements, another future aim is add more
agent based models to the system and to more
fully couple the existing models. Agents will
be added to the building simulation to bet-
ter model the dynamically changing occupancy
of buildings and connected to the transpor-
tation agents so that a traveler agent repre-
senting a commuter becomes a building occu-
pant agent in their place of occupation. Agents
will be added to simulate the power and water
utility operators, as well as owners and man-
agers of buildings and other infrastructure sys-
tems. The use of agents will allow planners to
better model the expected growth and evolu-
tion of the site for a wide variety of scenarios.
Agents will also be added to represent individ-
ual elements of the infrastructure that could
change over time because of age, use, weather
impacts, etc., which means that the effects of
service lifetimes of various infrastructure ele-
ments can be studied as well.
The data assimilation and modeling has been
performed primarily on desktop computers,
with larger ensemble modeling runs carried
out on academic cluster computing resources
7
using the Swift parallel scripting language.
8
Pro-
viding much faster than real-time calculations
affecting hundreds of thousands of param-
eters that exist in an urban environment takes

62 ISOCARP · REVIEW 11
BERGERSON ET AL
Acknowledgement: Argonne National
Laboratory’s work was supported by Chicago
Lakeside Development through interagency
agreement, through the U.S. Department of
Energy contract DE-AC02-06CH11357
a lot of computing power. While some analyses
such as isolated building energy use and traf-
fic simulation can be made on the desktop or
using cloud computing, other analyses such as
electric grid simulation, might require the use
of large supercomputing resources. Addition-
ally, the desire to evaluate thousands to tens
of thousands of design alternatives in an at-
tempt to optimize the entire development (as
opposed to individual infrastructure systems)
or even provide automatic optimization of par-
ameters to maximize performance or minimize
impacts under realistic constraints will require
multi-task and ensemble modeling approach-
es making use of significant computing power.
Perhaps in the future, a tool such as LakeSIM
will make use of supercomputing resources lo-
cated at the Argonne Leadership Computing
Facility, such as Mira, currently the fifth fastest
supercomputer in the world.
FUTURE USES OF THE PROGRAM
In addition to the direct application of LakeSIM
to inform the planning and design of the Chi-
cago Lakeside Development, the creators of
LakeSIM hope the program will eventually be
used to assist in the development and expan-
sion of many other urban environments. The
largest potential for future application of Lake-
SIM exists in Asia, where cities may be planned
in a matter of months and built in a few years
rather than in decades as expected for the
Lakeside Development. The largest problem
of urban infrastructure planning and design is
that systems are used for decades or centur-
ies, and often problems or weaknesses of the
infrastructure remains unidentified for the first
several years, or even decades, of operation.
By the time inadequacies and inefficiencies are
identified, the infrastructure is so massive and
integrated that the problems may be next to
impossible to rectify, and wholesale system
change-over is infeasible.

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DESIGNING FUTURE CITIES
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