A Geospatial Decision Meta-Model for Heterogeneous Model Management: A Regional Transportation Planning Case Study

Abstract

Many geospatial decision models exist for city-wide decision-making processes. Because of the heterogeneous characteristic of the models, it is challenging to share and reuse the decision models. To facilitate model sharing and reuse among organizations while considering the management of a distributed regional transportation planning model management system, this study proposes a geospatial decision meta-model to describe geospatial decision models in a unified way and discusses the development of five basic metadata components. The study also entails the design of the eleven-tuple model information description structure and an extension of the discrepant information of diverse decision models. A prototype system, the GeoDecisionModelManager, is designed and implemented to provide a common tool for modelling, registering, discovering and executing decision models described by the meta-model. A regional transportation planning scenario is used to test the versatility of the proposed meta-model and the applicability of the model’s formal expression based on the eleven-tuple metadata framework, which incorporates different geospatial decision models from various organizations and applies them in a distributed environment. The results show that the proposed meta-model is applicable for modelling and managing various sources of geospatial decision models and that it facilitates model discovering, sharing and reuse in a distributed environment.