Spatial Simulator

Session A Project

Session A Final Review
Oct 17
Weds 7:00p — 9:00p
Avery 114

Project Description

Groups will write a post on Medium with a hypothesis or prompt about something they want to simulate, for example:

1. Can an affordable housing policy spur mixed income growth in a neighborhood?
2. Can dynamic pricing on a street network create equitable access to city resources?
3. Can the adjacency of program types create neighborhoods that are vibrant around the clock?
4. What characteristics of cities make it more prone to congestion?
5. Can land use policy be driven by a sites ability to provide shared resources?
6. Can subway car crowding be minimized by making tweaks to the platform, door opening, or frequency of a train schedule?

A Medium Post :

(500–1500 Words with Images)

• Title — Every good project needs a catchy title
• Authors — Who are the authors, and who did what
• One Sentence — description of your project
• Intro — Backstory about what you are doing. Why is it important or relevant? How are decisions about what you are simulating currently made in the world? What is the current most cutting edge research in this area? What do you hope to learn from simulating this?
• Model — What is your model? What are the agents? What is the environment? How long are the time periods in your model (hour, day, years)? What are the behaviors and parameters of your agents? What are the inputs in your environment? What are the outputs of your model?
  This is also a good place to highlight anything unique custom or interesting you needed to build for your model. Show image, gifs, and/or videos of your simulation.
• Learnings — What questions do you want to answer with your simulation?
  Were you able to answer the initial questions you set out to answer with your simulation? Why or why not? Were there any emergent behaviors?Did you find anything surprising about your simulation? How did changing various parameters or characteristics change the
• Future Implications — What does this change about the future (or 10 years from now)? Does this simulation change how decisions could be made in the future? Does it change the way cities, building, or mobility work? If you had a magic wand, 1 million dollars and all of the experts needed to make your simulation amazing, what would it look like and what would its implications be?
• Code — well commented code (with each group member’s name credited for the segments which they wrote)

The Model

glossary definitions of what should be in your model:

individuals (agents) — could be humans, parcels of land, vehicles, animals, etc
environment — framework in which the interactions occur, i.e. a city, a neighborhood, a floor plan, a room, etc
behavior — the procedural rules that define how the individuals behave — i.e. a person move away from other people if a space gets crowded, or a person may be attracted to other people with particular characteristics, etc
parameters — characteristics of the agent — i.e. a agent that is a person might have speed, size, distance the agent will stand next to other agents, etc
input — parameters that globally drive the model — i.e. population size of your agents, climate or location for your environment, or other data that is put into the model
output — global parameters that are the outcome of running your model