The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) produces land use and transportation forecasts for the Phoenix metropolitan area, which includes Maricopa County. MAG membership includes 25 cities and towns, 3 Native American communities, Maricopa County, and the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT). The metropolitan area includes roughly 3.9 million people and 1.9 million jobs spread out over 9200 square miles.

We are currently testing the parcel based version of UrbanSim with a smaller portion of our region that includes 3 cities with ~195,000 parcels, ~166,000 buildings, ~104,000 jobs, and ~169,000 households. We have plans to expand this database to include all of Maricopa County (~1.5 million parcels).

At the current time we run the model system on a Windows XP workstation with 2 quad core Xeon 3.4 GHz processors, 4 GB of RAM, and a RAID5 array of 15,000 RPM disks. Our current test database runs for roughly 3 minutes per simulation year in our "subarea" based model system, and around 1 minute per simulation year in the region-wide configuration. We are not yet testing with travel model feedback.

-- JesseAyers - 23 Nov 2009