Open Platform for Urban Simulation Collaborators Wiki
Origins and Objectives
This is a wiki for the OPUS International Working Group, an international collaboration among research groups and planning agencies interested in contributing to the development of an Open Platform for Urban Simulation. The OPUS project originated from a meeting hosted by Eric Miller in Toronto in January 2005, in which research groups from several countries shared their experiences in developing integrated land use and transportation models. There was substantial common ground, and a sense that there was an opportunity to make better progress by developing some collaboration around a common software infrastructure that would allow individuals and groups to focus on advancing capabilities and undertaking new research, without having to 'recreate the wheel' in terms of infrastructure. This is when the idea of creating a common platform, called the Open Platform for Urban Simulation, originated.
Following the Toronto meeting, The UrbanSim project has undertaken the initial development of OPUS as an Open Source software platform for integrating land use, transportation and environmental models to support planning and policy analysis and participatory decision-making. The intitial release was done in June 2006, and it has been in rapid ongoing development since. This international working group reflects an effort to broaden the engagement in the ongoing development and use of the system to include other research groups from around the world who would benefit from using OPUS for developing their projects, and who could contribute functionality or extensions to it.
The objectives for the development of OPUS include:
- To lower cost and level of effort for research teams developing and applying integrated land use, transportation and environmental models.
- To increase the interoperability of model components created by users.
- To provide a common, standard software-based laboratory for testing, comparing and evaluating new algorithms and models.
- To increase the efficiency of dissemination of new innovations to the communities of research and practice.
Some of the means of achieving these objectives include:
- Providing a robust, modular computing platform to support the development and application of integrated land use, transportation and environmental models.
- Adopting a common API for connecting software components.
- Adopting data description standards for facilitating data exchange and model interoperability.
- Using licensing that is compatible with the General Public License (GPL)
International Working Group
In 2006, the UrbanSim group submitted a proposal to a solicitation from an NSF Digital Government project coordinated by SUNY Albany to provide travel funding for international collaborations on Digital Government projects. In this proposal, a series of meetings were proposed to provide opportunities to
