Modelling land use and cover changes (LUCC) at local and landscape scales simultaneously, in terms of composition and configuration, remains today highly challenging. Agricultural landscapes offer an illustrative context for this purpose.[br/] This article presents a modelling platform (DYPAL) able to simulate LUCC at both local (agricultural parcel, farm) and landscape levels by combining LUCC processes with an optimization algorithm.[br/] The efficiency of this approach is assessed by comparing it with an approach applying the same LUCC processes without optimization. Simulations have been developed for two representative case studies of temperate intensive agricultural mosaics: (1) neutral landscapes with simple and theoretical rules and (2) observed landscapes with realistic crop successions rules. Results show that this modelling platform improves the simulation of LUCC achieved at fine resolution, although not systematically. Improvements are observed when compared to theoretical farming practices. But, when compared with an observed landscape, it is true for one type of (arable) farms only. Several hypotheses are discussed, such as the fact that farmers possibly do not follow optimized rules.[br/] Finally, this study illustrates that the use of several indices is crucial to assess whether a simulated landscape is realistic or not, because it does not rely to the assessment of the predictive power of the model.