SMARTPLANS Modeling Framework
SMARTPLANS is developed as a full-fledged Integrated Urban Modeling System (IUM). The purpose is to have a platform that could be used to simulate land use changes and traffic flows on the road links of an urban transportation network. Outputs from the land use and transportation simulations are then used to generate several sustainability indicators that could be used to evaluate and compare different urban land use and transportation future growth scenarios.
As highlighted in the figure below, SMARTPLANS consist of seven integrated modules:
- Region Wide Aggregate Control Module
- Land Use Module
- Transportation Module
- Spatial Disaggregation Module
- Air Quality Module
- Sustainability Indicators Module
- Health Benefits Module
SMARTPLANS is also developed as a stand-alone software that is independent from any commercial software package. That is, all software components run on their own without the need to interact or interface with other commercial transportation simulation packages (e.g. EMME or TransCad). Further, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of SMARTPLANS is developed using the Open Source MapWindow dotSpatial GIS Library. This allows the analyst to display the spatial data characterizing the studied city.
Within SMARTPLANS, an urban area can be divided into a finite number of traffic analysis zones. On the other hand, the road network is presented as a planar network that consists of a number of links and nodes to represent the major urban arterials, highways and freeways. All spatial layers are represented using the ESRI conventional shapefile format.
Click on a specific Module or Model in the figure below to learn more about it:
