UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatial simulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. Œ Since its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planningŒ processes for at least a dozen regional governments which were usedŒ to help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationŒ infrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementedŒ using the Java programming language. The technology landscape forŒ scientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005Œ UrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizeŒ calculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementedŒ again to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availableŒ for scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,Œ makes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesŒ 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 customizedŒ solution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatoryŒ nature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describedŒ here has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftenŒ reticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized andŒ private data formats and software tools.
UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatialŒ simulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. Œ Since its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planningŒ processes for at least a dozen regional governments which were usedŒ to help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationŒ infrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementedŒ using the Java programming language. The technology landscape forŒ scientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005Œ UrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizeŒ calculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementedŒ again to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availableŒ for scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,Œ makes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesŒ 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 customizedŒ solution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatoryŒ nature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describedŒ here has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftenŒ reticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized andŒ private data formats and software tools.
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