UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatial simulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. ΠSince its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planningΠprocesses for at least a dozen regional governments which were usedΠto help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationΠinfrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementedΠusing the Java programming language. The technology landscape forΠscientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005ΠUrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizeΠcalculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementedΠagain to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availableΠfor scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,Πmakes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesΠto 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 customizedΠsolution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatoryΠnature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describedΠhere has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftenΠreticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized andΠprivate data formats and software tools.
UrbanSim is an open source software platform for agent-based geospatialΠsimulation, focusing on the spatial dynamics of urban development. ΠSince its creation UrbanSim has been used in the official planningΠprocesses for at least a dozen regional governments which were usedΠto help allocate billions of dollars in regional investments in transportationΠinfrastructure.UrbanSim was first conceptualized in the late 1990's and implementedΠusing the Java programming language. The technology landscape forΠscientific computing changed dramatically after that, and by 2005ΠUrbanSim was converted to Python, making heavy use of Numpy to vectorizeΠcalculations. By 2014, it became clear that UrbanSim should be reimplementedΠagain to take advantage of significant advances in the libraries availableΠfor scientific Python. The new version of UrbanSim, called UrbanSim2,Πmakes extensive use of community-supported scientific Python librariesΠto 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 customizedΠsolution in each domain. Additionally, the open and participatoryΠnature inherent in nearly all of the open source projects describedΠhere has been particularly embraced by governments, who are oftenΠreticent to support large commercial institutions and balkanized andΠprivate data formats and software tools.
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