Planned Tutorials

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Tutorials / Code-changes Under Development

The following people (in brackets with desired release date) are currently leading the development of the following tutorials and related code work.

1. [Travis; mid-January 2007] Extending the Indicator Creator tool to make it easier to create the same indicator for multiple years, and to create a possibly large set of different indicators with the push of one button.
2. [Jesse; mid-January 2007] Extending the Indicator Creator tool to export data to ArcMAP and automatically create indicator image files from ArcMAP.
3. [Joel] The UrbanSim data model. Improved documentation on the data model for for the set of database tables required by the Eugene demo application. Clarify how the data model needs dynamically depend upon the set of variables used by the set of models.
4. [Alan; March 2007] An indicator/variable language to generalize and extend our ability to specify Opus variables as expressions of other Opus variables.

Desired Tutorials

These are tutorials and code changes that we'd like to see, and hope to work on in the medium term:

1. How to use the run manager to run a single model.
2. A Data Conversion Tool, with GUI, to migrate data to/from the UrbanSim_Cache and alternative targets including MySQL, MS SQL, Access, and ASCII TAB and CSV formats. Of course this requires adding interfaces to MS SQL and Access.
3. Cross-scenario indicators - extend out indicator framework to create indicators that compare scenarios.
4. A Model Specification and Estimation Tool, with GUI, for specifying the variables to be used in a model, and then estimating the model.
5. A Model Configuration and Packaging tutorial, which might or might not involve a GUI, that would focus on how to create a model, configure it, and insert it into a model system. Conceptually, the idea is to create a plug-in framework to make it easy to add a new model and its documentation. This would require very extensive modification of the configuration of models.
6. Configuring models - perhaps a tutorial showing how a model like the Household Location Choice Model could be configured to run on gridcells, parcels, or zones (and how this changes the data structures and model specifications).
7. Connecting UrbanSim and ArcGIS - enhancing the connection between UrbanSim and the set of ESRI tools.
8. Data preparation tools.
9. Restructuring the documentation. We need to improve the documentation to make it current, accurate and helpful to a range of users with different needs. This might involve breaking it up into separate documents for components like:
   1. Database development
   2. Model specification and estimation
   3. Creating scenarios and running the model system
   4. Developing new models
   5. OPUS Architecture and Creating OPUS Packages