Project Meeting 2023.08.01 - ActivitySim/activitysim GitHub Wiki
Agenda
Road Map Update: Product Roadmap v2 (WSP)
Meeting Notes
The Roadmap is a public facing documentation that outlines the vision and we want consensus over next fiscal year but general agreement on the direction for the next five years.
Goals:
Reach a firm consensus on activities for the next fiscal year (July 2023 to June 2024).
Broad agreement on the direction for the next five years.
The frameworks should allow for adjustments to the trajectory.
Only need to publish the parts of the Roadmap for which there is a consensus.
Roadmap contents includes proposed versions/releases, which list key features for users and developers separately.
Version 1.5 – most things here are design ready for the improvements proposed, not adding a bunch of functionality.
Data model
Explicit representation of working from home – attach a telecommuter attribute to persons in the synthetic population
Pros
Code overhead is low
Adds flexibility and some value (being able to track telecommuter separately would be very helpful, as noted by some consortium members)
Cons
Would need to re-estimate, if you wanted to enable this feature, so it wouldn’t help you much if you already estimated with the current version
Not really giving much policy improvements since things work ok in the aggregate
Folks may not have sufficient survey data to understand if people are telecommuting and understand when people are and are not working at home. Scheduling models don’t have a variable to understand working at home over varying hours.
If this was a priority for an agency, a few agencies could fund it separately and have the consortium focus on other things.
Improved connection to estimation
Structural consistency - would be a good step towards ActivitySim 2.0
Numba expression auditing – would provide direction to individual users for expressions that can or cannot be compiled. Jeff is not completely sure how to do it and will evaluate the feasibility/level of effort to do so
Multithreading
Feedback that there still needs to be a temperature read on what’s important to the consortium.
Need something to establish a voting system or some structured feedback to ensure everyone is heard
Propose to use Github discussions and/or issues for individual work items
Moving forward – secondary effort could be to prioritize the roadmap
Step 1: create issues for all of these
Step 2: series of focused discussions and prioritization exercise
Next Steps for WSP: The deliverables have been provided. WSP is waiting to hear back from the consortium on whether this task is complete; and if not, what else needs to be done.