Agenda

• Status update on input checker
• Conferences
  • Discuss paper topics for TRB Annual Meeting
• Response to Eric Miller editorial

Meeting Notes

Admin

• Caitlin has set up an ActivitySim Google Drive. Joe to set up permissions and such to make it easy to access development and administrative stuff.

Input Checker Update

Presentation: input_checker_pt4_pydantic&pandera.pptx

• Pandera implementation
  • Components/steps include input checker file; specify class for each input table; inherit the class; and then you can define checks, field, etc.
  • It can integrate with the enums file, where you can specify enumerated variables that makes checking easy.
  • You can specify custom checks.
  • It is very simple to call.
  • The down side is that it’s not a true “data model." It does not explicitly embed the relationships (you have to join files).
• Pydantic
  • Explicitly embedded relationships
  • Operates on “serialize” data
  • Similar to pandera but a little more overhead because of this serialize step
  • Not the most computationally efficient but it is useful for understanding and building a tool based on relationships.
• Runtime for MTC is ~30 minutes with pydantic approach, versus pandera which is ~30 seconds. You could implement a pydantic approach that doesn’t serialize. There may be something incorrect with the implementation, exceptations for runtime are about 2 to 5 minutes. RSG can look into optimizations and/or Pydantic 2.0.
• Anticipating validators on zone files and other inputs, they just weren't presented today.
• Path forward
  • Retain and improve on Pandera approach
  • Leave Pydantic example available for those that want to use it or if we move to that in the future

TRB

• Paper submittal
  • With it being almost July, there's about two weeks to generate content and two weeks for synthesizing and editing.
  • A rough outline has been drafted but we need 3 agencies to volunteer content about their implementations. Ideally, the volunteers would represent a range of implementations (for example, 1-zone and 2-zone). Some suggestions included:
    • ARC - volunteered to write
    • SEMCOG is the farthest along and can present their transition from a trip-based model to ActivitySim
    • MetCouncil has stood up a model with limited effort to port over an existing implementation
    • PSRC could bring the perspective of an agency that's developed ActivitySim in-house, but they do not have the capacity to contribute at this time
    • MWCOG
    • SANDAG has integration with special market models
  • Joe C and Michelle to coordinate whether or not to move forward with drafting a paper