UrbanSim Estimation Project for the Puget Sound Regional Council

This page describes the process and results of estimating UrbanSim for the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) dataset. For information on the development of the PSRC dataset, see our PSRC home page.

We have automated as much of the estimation process as possible. This makes it much easier for us to update the estimates and re-generate the UrbanSim baseyear tables when the input data has changed. See the estimation process documentation for details.

The final report for the estimation process as it was performed in June of 2004 is available in a pdf format, here.

The Estimation build system has recently been revived and updated (as of January 2005) to work with our newer installations of mySQL, and the evolution of our Python coding environment since the original PSRC Estimation effort. The newer version of the pdf report is here. This documentation is updated each time changes to the process inputs or scripts are committed to the Estimation project's repository. However, be aware that the maps contained in the document are not automatically regenerated, and could possibly be out of sync with the data in the tables, since this is now a live document.

The estimation process involves two projects, connected by some manual steps.
- The Estimation_Prep project creates input data for the actual estimation process.
- We use the Limdep software to do the actual estimation. This is a manual step that requires substantial expertise with doing estimation, since there are lots of judgment calls about what variables to include and when to declare estimation to be "done."
- The Estimation project creates the related baseyear tables for UrbanSim from the Limdep inputs and outputs. This process automatically computes indicator values for the estimation results, and automatically packages these in a final report (available here), curtsey of our automated build system.
You can download, examine, and run these scripts. The Estimation_Prep and Estimation projects both reside in our publicly visible CVS repository named production-code. See the UrbanSim website for information on how to connect to this CVS project.
To run these processes, you need to install some supporting software.

Many thanks to all of our project team members and funders! They are listed on our main project website: