UrbanSim

UrbanSim is an open source urban simulation system designed by Paul Waddell (University of California, Berkeley) and developed with numerous collaborators to support metropolitan land use, transportation, and environmental planning. It has been distributed on the web since 1998, with regular revisions and updates, from www.urbansim.org. Synthicity Inc coordinates the development of UrbanSim and provides professional services to support its application. The development of UrbanSim has been funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration, as well as support from states, metropolitan planning agencies and research councils in Europe and South Africa. Reviews of UrbanSim and comparison to other urban modeling platforms may be found in references.

The first documented application of UrbanSim was a prototype application to the Eugene-Springfield, Oregon setting. Later applications of the system have been documented in several U.S. cities, including Detroit, Michigan, Salt Lake City, Utah, San Francisco, California, and Seattle, Washington. In Europe, UrbanSim has been applied in Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; and Zurich, Switzerland with various other applications not yet documented in published papers.

The initial implementation of UrbanSim was implemented in Java. The software architecture was modularized and reimplemented in Python beginning in 2005, making extensive use of the Numpy numerical library. The software has been generalized and abstracted from the UrbanSim model system, and is now referred to as the Open Platform for Urban Simulation (OPUS), in order to facilitate a plug-in architecture for models such as activity-based travel, dynamic traffic assignment, emissions, and land cover change. OPUS includes a Graphical User Interface, and a concise expression language to facilitate access to complex internal operations by non-programmers. Beginning in 2012, UrbanSim was re-implemented using current Scientific Python libraries such as Pandas. UrbanSim Inc. has developed the UrbanSim Cloud Platform that deploys simulations on the cloud for scalability, enabling hundreds or even thousands of simulations to be run simultaneously, and a web browser based User Interface that features a 3D web map view of inputs and outputs from the simulation. UrbanSim models have been pre-built for 400 metropolitan areas within the United States at a census block level of detail. Users anywhere in the world can also build UrbanSim models using zone and parcel templates, by uploading local data and using the cloud resources to auto-specify and calibrate the models using local data. Details are available at www.urbansim.com.

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