Do you have questions about the UrbanSim Cloud Platform? This forum topic is the first place to ask those questions and look for answers. UrbanSim staff and users will post general questions here and offer responses. Here are a few key points about the new platform and the roadmap for extending it to anticipate some initial questions.
When is it available? It is available now! We have just delivered our first user accounts to UrbanSim Cloud Platform users. Thus initial release is for the census block version UrbanSim. That is, the model runs using census blocks as its smallest unit of geography. We are working hard to finish zone and parcel versions up to enable users anywhere in the world to build and run UrbanSim models quickly, and will post announcements here as soon as they are ready. Early 2017 is our target.
Is it available for my area? We have developed nation-wide coverage of census block level UrbanSim data and models, for approximately 400 metropolitan areas in the United States. These are fully built models, estimated and calibrated using local, public data. They are ready to begin using from day one. If your location is outside the United States, no problem. We also have the zone and parcel versions of the model system that will be made available on a Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) basis.
What is the licensing and pricing plan? We are providing the platform on an annual subscription basis. Pricing is structured to be vastly less expensive than the cost of having us (or anyone) build a model using traditional consulting effort. How do we do this? With a lot of cloud-based automation tools, like our auto-specification service that enables searching over thousands of model specifications to find the best-fitting specifications to local data, and our calibration service to adjust the model to ensure it predicts well, over time, as a whole. We also have leveraged the explosion of cloud computing infrastructure that now makes highly scalable computing on the cloud extremely cost effective and time-efficient compared to local computing, even with large and expensive servers. Our pricing is discounted as more user accounts are added within an organization. Please contact us to get all the details.
I am a professor or a student. Is there any special pricing for academic use? Absolutely! Given the long academic roots of this project, we want to help students and researchers maximize their potential to leverage urban modeling and data using the UrbanSim Cloud Platform, so we are offering subscriptions for academic use at no cost. We will need to get an authorized party at the academic institution to sign a master subscription agreement, but usage for academic research and for teaching is supported for free. One caveat: we will only be able to offer a limited amount of cloud computing since this is a real cost we would have to absorb, so we will rate-limit academic users to 100 simulations per institution per year at our expense. Above that, academic users can either pay for additional cloud computing, or can opt for a local installation and use in-house computing resources.
Is UrbanSim data open? Can we load our own local data? Yes! We want to promote the broad collection and sharing of urban data as Open Data. Many cities are getting on the open data bandwagon, and beginning to make their data accessible via Open Data Applications Programming Intrfaces (APIs). And of course OpenStreetMap is a fantastic crowdsourced map of the world, that continues to improve based on user contributions and edits. But until now there has not been an Open Data Repository for data needed to analyze and plan urban areas: boundaries and information on parcels, on buildings (not just their footprint), on city general plans and zoning, on development projects in the pipeline, on building permits, and on proposed transportation projects. Rather than pursue a one-city-at-a-time approach to open data in which users need to go to each and every city to try to get what they need for projects that require analyzing larger areas or that cross city boundaries, our goal is to create a global repository for these critically important data. So we will enable users anywhere to contribute data to the UrbanSim Commons, and to access the data contributed by others. We organize the data by Metropolitan Area, and fully integrate it so that users can begin doing analysis with all of the available data ready to use. One caveat: some data used by UrbanSim users may not be freely shareable: such as confidential employment data from state unemployment insurance records, or confidential survey data, or propietary data from data providers. We will of course respect any licensing restrictions on data and provide secure permissions management to ensure that protected data remains private.
Is UrbanSim still Open Source? I want to contribute! Absolutely! And we are committed to keeping it that way. You can find all the code for UrbanSim and a portfolio of other libraries we are coordinating at the Urban Data Science Toolkit on GitHub. If you are a developer and want to contribute to any of our open source projects, you are welcome! We encourage academic researchers, consultants, and of course all UrbanSim users in Metropolitan Planning Organizations, Cities, and elsewhere, to contribute. We will be working hard to increase the communication and transparency of ongoing development of UrbanSim and its constellation of tools on UDST, and hope to rapidly increase the engagement of a broader coalition of capable developers to continuously improve it.
