UrbanSim2: Simulating the Connected Metropolis

Abstract

UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatial simulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. a Since its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planninga processes for at least a dozen regional governments which were useda to help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationa infrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementeda using the Java programming language. The technology landscape fora scientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005a UrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizea calculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementeda again to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availablea for scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,a makes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesa to reduce the amount of domain-specific customized code to a minimum.UrbanSim is an excellent case study for the power of leveraging thework of the scientific programming community as scaffolding for adomain-specific application, as opposed to building an extensive customizeda solution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatorya nature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describeda here has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftena reticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized anda private data formats and software tools. UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatiala simulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. a Since its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planninga processes for at least a dozen regional governments which were useda to help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationa infrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementeda using the Java programming language. The technology landscape fora scientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005a UrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizea calculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementeda again to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availablea for scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,a makes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesa to reduce the amount of domain-specific customized code to a minimum.UrbanSim is an excellent case study for the power of leveraging thework of the scientific programming community as scaffolding for adomain-specific application, as opposed to building an extensive customizeda solution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatorya nature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describeda here has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftena reticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized anda private data formats and software tools.-->