MobiSim provides support in defining planning proposals and testing them out by computer simulations. It helps to adjudicate competing claims about the economic, social and environmental benefits of planning policies. The MobiSim platform is descriptive and exploratory, but not predictive. It can be described as a rule-based LUTI platform to support creative planning and innovation.

• Scientists, planners and stakeholders currently agree that land-use and transport planning are interdependent and need to be envisioned together.

• MobiSim is a LUTI (Land-Use and Transport Integrated) simulation platform that provides insight into how transport and land-use influence one another on several scales. To do this, it combines several models covering demographic, social, economic and spatial processes.

• The model assumptions take into account recent advances in complex systems theory and theoretical and quantitative geography.

Comprehensive rule-based modelling

• MobiSim is a spatially explicit simulation platform. Modelled entities are individuals and dwellings. Rules determine how individuals form households. Other rules locate dwellings within buildings.

• Stylized facts represent the residential and mobility behaviours of households and individuals. Behavioural changes result from changes in the characteristics of individuals and households (e.g. births, unions, ageing, deaths) as well as changes in their environment.

• The availability of places to live evolves as a consequence of house building. Places where individuals go about their daily business (e.g. shops, places of employment) do not change endogenously.

• Spatial and behavioural rules are strictly formalized but flexible and allow for fuzzy and uncertain behaviours and phenomena.

• Behaviours of households and individuals are aggregated to yield daily and residential mobility patterns. Individual trajectories (e.g. family life cycles, residential trajectories, changes of transport mode) can be analysed over time.

A medium for discussion and a support for creativity

• MobiSim is an anti-black box simulation platform in which all hypotheses are explicitly and clearly stated within a formalized framework.

• The MobiSim platform helps scientists, planners and stakeholders to integrate and compare their respective knowledge by defining behavioural rules and planning options.

• MobiSim enables companion modelling, designed to facilitate planning decisions by helping users to imagine future changes and to identify ways to impel or manage those changes on several spatial scales.