Week 1 – Laying the Groundwork
Edward Z -
Hello everyone! Welcome back. If this is your first time reading, let me summarize my project for you! My name is Eddie and I’m building a school pickup simulation framework to test various smart reservation systems to reduce parent waiting times, student stress, school administrator hassles, and carbon emission reductions to make our school communities even better. Since last week, I’ve had a lot of new developments, so I’ll be recapping them here:
First, I had my first meeting back with Professor Zhou – while the majority of the conversation was quite dense – we essentially talked about our first steps of gathering data and setting up the simulation. Here is the memo. To gather clean, efficient data I’ll be using OvertureMaps, an open-source data provider for high-quality building, road segment, and place data made by the collective efforts of Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom. They’ve created an open-source specification framework to download the entire globe’s 3D buildings and roads, so I’ll be using it as my data source. Today, actually in a few hours after writing this, we’ll hop on a call with them and discuss how I can use their technology in a potential partnership.
In the past week, I’ve also been trying my best to download their road data (to obtain lane restrictions and speed limits). I haven’t solved it yet, and it’s been at least 4 days day-in day-out at this problem. Because the provider is relatively new, there are a few issues that have no online solutions – so I’ve been figuring them out. Currently, I’ve resolved to use Apache Sedona to download the parquet files to transform them into geojsons.
Despite setbacks, this project has a grander vision. In the shorter term, I’ll be linking the Geojson files to the General Modeling Network Specification (GMNS) to prepare the files for simulation. Additionally, I’ll be reworking Dr. Jiawei Lu’s and Prof. Zhou’s CAMLite‘s data structures to fit the specification needs of the traffic simulation. Namely, how students are dropped off, lane changing, parent arrivals, etc. Unfortunately, because of those setbacks, I’ll have to talk about these more in-depth next week when I get a chance to work on it.
Well, that’s all I have for now. Next week, I’ll come out with some diagrams, figures, and charts for you to understand my project more deeply. And if you’re interested in how they’ve done their previous modeling in CAMLite please see their paper which is published here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0968090X23002127?via%3Di
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