Abstract Land suitability is one of the important variables influencing urbanization and needs to be considered in urban growth simulation and modeling. The present study is aimed to introduce land suitability which is a function of a few important urbanization explanatory drivers into an urban growth model for realistic urban growth simulation. Development of SLEUTH-Suitability, an improved version of the SLEUTH urban growth model has been presented in which land suitability has been integrated as an additional urban growth decision variable. The model development includes land suitability assessment, Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework and its integration in the urban growth simulation process of the existing SLEUTH model, writing programming code, and verification of SLEUTH-Suitability version. The performance of the SLEUTH-Suitability version has been quantified in terms of relative improvement in the best fit value of the Optimal SLEUTH Metric (OSM), spatial and statistical measures while simulating urban growth of Ajmer City in the Rajasthan state of India as compared to existing SLEUTH version. Both versions i.e., SLEUTH and SLEUTH-Suitability models were parameterized and calibrated using a required dataset of 05 years over a period of 18 years i.e., 1997, 2000, 2008, 2013, and 2015. Performance of the SLEUTH-Suitability has been found to be better in terms of improved calibration as indicated by better OSM values and improved capturing of different urban growth forms like fragmented and scattered growth. Furthermore, using the SLEUTH-Suitability, urban growth is forecasted up to the year 2040 in Ajmer city to understand the growth pattern.

中文翻译：

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土地适宜性和城市增长模型：SLEUTH-Suitability 的发展

摘要 土地适宜性是影响城市化的重要变量之一，需要在城市增长模拟和建模中加以考虑。本研究旨在将土地适宜性作为一些重要的城市化解释驱动因素的函数引入到城市增长模型中，以进行现实的城市增长模拟。SLEUTH-Suitability 的发展是 SLEUTH 城市增长模型的改进版本，其中土地适宜性已被整合为额外的城市增长决策变量。模型开发包括土地适宜性评估、基于多标准评估（MCE）的层次分析过程（AHP）框架及其在现有 SLEUTH 模型的城市增长模拟过程中的集成、编写程序代码和验证 SLEUTH-Suitability 版本。SLEUTH-Suitability 版本的性能已根据最佳 SLEUTH 指标 (OSM) 的最佳拟合值的相对改进、空间和统计措施进行量化，同时模拟印度拉贾斯坦邦阿杰梅尔市的城市增长与现有的 SLEUTH 版本。两个版本，即 SLEUTH 和 SLEUTH-Suitability 模型都使用所需的 05 年数据集在 18 年期间（即 1997、2000、2008、2013 和 2015）进行了参数化和校准。 已经发现 SLEUTH-Suitability 的性能在更好的校准方面表现更好，如更好的 OSM 值和更好地捕捉不同的城市增长形式，如分散和分散的增长。此外，使用 SLEUTH-Suitability，