AI Agent as Urban Planner: Steering Stakeholder Dynamics in Urban Planning via Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a consensus-based multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for urban land use planning, enabling stakeholder participation and optimizing land use decisions through collective decision-making and graph neural networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-agent RL approach with a consensus mechanism for participatory urban planning, integrating geographic data and stakeholder interests.

Findings

Enhances land use efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction.

Improves adaptability of urban planning to community needs.

Demonstrates effectiveness on real-world community data.

Abstract

In urban planning, land use readjustment plays a pivotal role in aligning land use configurations with the current demands for sustainable urban development. However, present-day urban planning practices face two main issues. Firstly, land use decisions are predominantly dependent on human experts. Besides, while resident engagement in urban planning can promote urban sustainability and livability, it is challenging to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders. To address these challenges, we introduce a Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for real-world land use readjustment. This framework serves participatory urban planning, allowing diverse intelligent agents as stakeholder representatives to vote for preferred land use types. Within this framework, we propose a novel consensus mechanism in reward design to optimize land utilization through collective decision making. To abstract the structure of the complex urban system, the geographic information of cities is transformed into a spatial graph structure and then processed by graph neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on both traditional top-down planning and participatory planning methods from real-world communities indicate that our computational framework enhances global benefits and accommodates diverse interests, leading to improved satisfaction across different demographic groups. By integrating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, our framework ensures that participatory urban planning decisions are more dynamic and adaptive to evolving community needs and provides a robust platform for automating complex real-world urban planning processes.