MUSSA is a land use model developed to interact with the Santiago four-stage transport model called ESTRAUS. It was developed as an application of the BID-CHOICE theory of the competitive urban land market, where land rents are endogenous and consistent with equilibrium conditions, including land availability and developers’ behavior. Interaction with transport occurs through economic access measures obtained from the ESTRAUS model; in turn, MUSSA provides the locations of activities (households and firms). Total activity volumes and population forecasts are exogenously provided by a region input-output model. The whole system interacts through a central data base with a graphic interface (geographic information system) under Windows. MUSSA is able to forecast location choices of 65 household clusters into 264 zones and six dwelling types plus five firm types allocated to lot sizes; residents and firms compete for the available land. It is a fully disaggregated behavioral location model that is applied in a static equilibrium approach. The package and the model are presented; its capacities and limitations, data requirements, software, and outputs are described; and some performance indexes are presented.
Effects of initialization of a global land-use model on simulated land change and loss of natural vegetation