Project Meeting 2022.03.24

Agenda

Administrative Items

AMPO Conference

• Presentation Ideas
  • Current MPO activities with ActivitySim
    • Guy (ARC) could provide an update on their ActivitySim development and how they plan to use it
    • Jilan (SEMCOG) could provide an update but not sure if they will attend the conference.
    • Dennis Farmer (MetCouncil) could say that they are in the early stages of ActivitySim development and they will be at the conference.
    • Joe (SANDAG) almost done translating cross-border model to the platform, demonstrates the flexibility of the tool kit.
    • MWCOG could represent an MPO that's just started.
  • Discuss the benefits of ABMs and ActivitySim (appealing to those who either have ABMs and could transition to ActivitySim or those who have trip-based models and could transition to an ABM/ActivitySim)

University Transportation Center (UTC) collaboration/proposal

• Collaboration possibilities sparked concern about doing too much too soon
  • Look back at the vision about what they want ActivitySim to be
  • Want this to be super tested, reliable, fast, etc., and don’t want us to bring in more features that are possibly less quality, black boxes, more complexity/confusion, etc. Consortium may want to retain control over curating the content and direction of ActivitySim.
• Concerns about the additional work leading to an increased level of effort for testing and code review. But, could we use academic funds/staff for testing and code review?
• We do already have access to academics via consultant contracts.
• Want to be thoughtful and intentional about the engagement with UTCs.
• Next Steps
  • Greg and/or Jeff to more clearly develop a proposal (on paper) of how this collaboration might work.

Partners-only Meeting Report-out

• Desire to keep better track of schedules for delivering work.
  • Joe C to follow-up with consultants on outstanding and current tasks.
• Interest in creating subgroup meetings for focused technical discussions, but without adding more meetings. Suggestion to keep existing meetings but have breakout rooms to address specific issues. (CS to test meeting technology to record all breakout rooms.)
• Desire to be more intentional about design work around testing and a well-defined structure
  • Suggestion to watch Emme's webinar of Emme Agent, where they take a very modular, structured approach to what a model component is, what goes into it, what comes out, etc.
  • Specific suggestion to look into how they handle skims. Jeff proposed some ways to manage skims more efficiently.
• Trademark on ActivitySim has been published and open to review so people can protest it. Hopefully in a couple of months, with no objections, this process could be complete.