Project Meeting 2023.08.01

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.