Based on their extensive studies on using planning support systems in Beijing planning practices and research, Dr Ying Long and Prof Shen have published a monograph in Springer. The details are as follows. The book is available online now (CLICK HERE).

Land use patterns, or land use layout, is one of the key issues in the compilation of an urban master plan. Government, planners and residents, all with various requirements and preferences, are the agents participating in this process in China. Among them, planners play a role in negotiating with related agents and then establishing land use patterns. In this paper, we propose the Planner Agent theory to support land use pattern scenario analysis (LUPSA), based on existing Planning Support System (PSS) research. Planner Agents are divided into three types: Non-spatial Planner Agent (NPA), Spatial Planner Agent (SPA) and Chief Planner Agent (CPA). The NPA is responsible for formulating special plans (such as transport, municipal public facilities or nature reserve plans) that correspond to available data (such as road network, public facilities and nature reserve patterns) from LUPSA. The SPA is responsible for establishing and evaluating land use patterns. The SPA considers constraints of local development conditions, communicates and coordinates with the NPA to confirm special plans formulated by the NPA that can support implementation of the established land use pattern. The CPA is responsible for determining the final land use pattern after a public participation process involving local residents. This theory was initially tested in a hypothetical city, followed by an experiment in Beijing. Results show that the proposed Planner Agent theory is suitable for LUPSA, and is more efficient and scientific than traditional planning methods.

Planning support systems (PSSs) have attracted extensive attention from scholars and decision makers for decades. Most of the existing research on PSSs is related to system design, implementation, application as well as evaluation of a standalone system in one area, e.g. What if?, CommunityViz and INDEX. There is no existing research on an entire framework of PSSs for various types of plans. In this paper, we propose a PSS framework for various types of plans in China, e.g. master plan, detailed plan, municipal infrastructure plan and transport plan. Based on an extensive literature review and multiple rounds of planner and decision maker surveys, the framework focuses on two aspects. On one hand, we itemize plan contents (termed as “plan elements”) into various steps for each type of plan, e.g. population forecasting and establishing urban growth boundaries in a master plan. On the other hand, we list related PSSs for each plan element. In our research, PSSs embody three forms, which are existing PSS software (e.g. What if? and INDEX), planning support models to be developed or already developed as well as quantitative methods (e.g. scenario analysis, systems analysis, and logistic regression). The two dimensional framework provides a full picture of PSS applications in various types of plans. The framework has been applied in the Beijing Institute of City Planning (BICP) for several months, and has attracted hundreds of application requests from planners.

This paper appears in the Springer book "Geospatial Analysis for Supporting Urban Planning in Beijing" as a chapter.

Urban containment policies, including urban growth boundaries, urban service boundaries and greenbelts, have been extensively discussed worldwide for managing urban growth. This paper focuses on the issues associated with supporting an urban containment plan and its application in China using a planning support system. The background is that the urban containment plan has been enacted as a new component of the urban plan under the City Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China. In China, the accommodating or restrictive features are integrated as control factors (CFs), which include control indicators for land-use type control, urban activity control, building height control, as well as underground development control. This paper proposes an urban containment planning support system (UC-PSS) based on ArcGIS for automatically compiling the Beijing urban containment plan considering 60 control factors with various control indicators. The compiled plan was also applied for reviewing urban master and district detail plans in Beijing supported by the UC-PSS. The effectiveness of UC-PSS was comprehensively evaluated from the perspectives of planning compilation and planning review via interviewing urban containment planners (main users of the UC-PSS) in Beijing.