Release Notes for Version 4.3

These release notes are for the 4.3 versions of Opus/UrbanSim (currently only a development version -- stable release 4.3.0 is not yet out). These notes cover changes since 6 March 2009.

September 2010

• The model explorer now works on an empty set of models (option -m is not required anymore).
• Constant was added to the list of available variables in the submodel editor. Thus, constants do not have to be entered manually anymore.
• Memory management in a GUI estimation process improved.
• Added an option for limiting the number of records in submodels when estimating models. Entry 'submodel_size_max' in estimate_config should be a single integer. If the number of records in a submodel exceeds this limit, the records are randomly sampled within the submodel.

July 2010

• Consolidated the usage of unique_values, unique (numpy > 1.3.0), and unique1d (1.3.0<numpy < 1.4.0) to opus_core.misc.unique.

June 2010

• New model implemented in opus_core, called iterative meta model. It iterates over a set of given models until a given condition is fulfilled. The urbansim.xml contains a template for it.
• New tag introduced to the xml nodes, called inherit_parent_values, that controls for inheritance. If it is 'True' or not given, the given node is merged with its parent. If it is 'False', no merging is done. This tag is automatically set to 'False' for nodes 'specification' and 'submodel', in order to be able to delete variables defined in the parent specification.
• Dataset methods that use rpy converted to rpy2. These are r_histogram, r_scatter, r_image, r_correlation_image. All methods accept a file name and file type as arguments for exporting the plot into a file.
• Special methods are added to Dataset class to allow access dataset attribute with dataset[attribute_name] and dataset.attribute_name. See opus_core/datasets/dataset.py for details.
• A bug in indicator column name is fixed; it now uses the variable name from Variable Library instead of "autogenvarXX" for column name
• New command line script urbansim/tools/make_indicators.py creates indicators from indicator_batch section of xml_configuration
• aggregate expression now supports median function, for example: median_income=zone.aggregate(household.income, function=median)
• default random seed is changed from 0 to None for pseudo-random seed

November 2009 - May 2010

• Interactive tool for model exploration (model_explorer) implemented.

TODO

9 November 2009

The Subversion repository for UrbanSim and OPUS code is moved from https://trondheim.cs.washington.edu/svn/opus to https://svn.urbansim.org.

18 June 2009

A new version of the sample data for the latest development version is available at http://www.urbansim.org/opus/releases/opus-4-3-dev-18jun2009.zip. This file updates the XML version number on the skeleton configurations in project_configs, and fixes a bug in the cached definition of the is_pre_1940 variable (one of the variables in the Real Estate Price Model).

6 March 2009

The opus.zip data file was updated to include shapefiles (gridcell and zone shapefiles for eugene and gridcell, parcels, zone, fazes, and large_areas shapefiles for seattle). These files are used by Mapnik to create vector-based maps.

-- AlanBorning - 18 Jun 2009