A domain-specific language for urban simulation variables

Authors:
Alan Borning;Hana Ševčíková;Paul Waddell
Affiliations:
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington;University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Venue:
dg.o '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Digital government research
Year:
2008

Citing 9
Cited 1

Miranda: a non-strict functional language with polymorphic types

Proc. of a conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture
Programming pearls: little languages

Communications of the ACM
Domain-specific languages: an annotated bibliography

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Unit testing frameworks

SIGCSE '02 Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
YP and Urban Simulation: Applying an Agile Programming Methodology in a Politically Tempestuous Domain

ADC '03 Proceedings of the Conference on Agile Development
A case study in digital government: developing and applying UrbanSim, a system for simulating urban land use, transportation, and environmental impacts

Social Science Computer Review
When and how to develop domain-specific languages

ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit

Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit
Revised6 report on the algorithmic language scheme

Journal of Functional Programming

Supporting agile modeling through experimentation in an integrated urban simulation framework

Proceedings of the 11th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference on Public Administration Online: Challenges and Opportunities

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

UrbanSim is a modeling system for simulating the development of urban regions over periods of 20--30 years. Its purpose is to help evaluate alternative proposed policies and transportation infrastructure projects by simulating the long-term impacts of the different alternatives. In the process of adapting and calibrating the system for use in a new region, planners and modelers must prepare input data, specify and estimate a set of component models, and assess the results before giving them to policy makers. All of these activities involve considerable investigation and experimentation using different model variables that describe attributes of actors, processes, and geographies of the simulated environment. In many cases, the original variables must be transformed or combined to create new variables that are more suitable for analysis; and in other cases, creating new variables on the fly may facilitate exploration of the results. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of domain-specific language for specifying these variables, with a syntax and semantics tailored to the domain. As a result of using this language, the code size for specifying variables is reduced by an order of magnitude, and user productivity is greatly increased.