Transport

This is the home of the NISMOD v2 Transport Model.

Description

NISMOD v2 Transport Model is a national-scale (Great Britain) transport model developed to support policy making regarding the future infrastructure. It forecasts the impact of various endogenous and exogenous factors on transport demand and capacity utilisation, following an elasticity-based simulation methodology. The model consists of three submodels covering the following modes of transport: road (passenger and freight vehicle flows), rail (total station usage), and air (domestic and international passenger movements).

Setup to develop and run the model (Eclipse IDE)

Install Java Development Kit version 11. This should work with Oracle Java, the code is developed and tested using openjdk11.
Install Eclipse IDE for Java Developers: https://eclipse.org/downloads/.
Run Eclipse and choose the workspace folder.
Import the existing Maven project from the local git folder where the code has been cloned. In Eclipse: File -> Import -> Maven -> Existing Maven Projects. Wait until all Maven dependencies (specified in the pom.xml file) are downloaded. If the pom.xml file has been changed, the Maven project should be first updated (Alt+F5).
The classes containing the main method can be run as a Java application. The classes containing the methods annotated with @Test can be run as JUnit tests.
To run the main model in Eclipse, open the Run Configuration for nismod.transport.App.java and pass the path to the config file as an argument:

Setup to run the model

Make sure the Java home environment variable is set for your operating system and pointing to the directory where Java Development Kit has been installed.

On Ubuntu:

apt install openjdk11 mvn

Download maven, install it and set the environment variables: http://maven.apache.org/.

mvn clean install

To run the base-year road model (2015) type:

java -cp target/transport-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar nismod.transport.App -c
./path/to/config.properties -b

To predict and run a future year (e.g. 2020) using the results of a previously run year (e.g. 2015), for road model type:

java -cp target/transport-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar nismod.transport.App -c
./path/to/config.properties -road 2020 2015

To predict and run a future year (e.g. 2020) using the results of a previously run year (e.g. 2015), for rail model type:

java -cp target/transport-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar nismod.transport.App -c
./path/to/config.properties -rail 2020 2015

To predict and run a future year (e.g. 2020) using the results of a previously run year (e.g. 2015), for air model type:

java -cp target/transport-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar nismod.transport.App -c
./path/to/config.properties -air 2020 2015

To run the interactive showcase demo (1920 x 1080 resolution required) type:

java -cp target/transport-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar nismod.transport.App -c
./path/to/config.properties -d

Options:

To increase the max heap size, run with java -XX:MaxHeapSize=120g ...
To enable debug messages, run with java -Dlog4j2.debug ...

Docker and DAFNI

DAFNI provides another environment to run the model.

To prepare the model for DAFNI, there are two elements:

build a docker container image, and upload as a DAFNI model
prepare the project data files, and upload as DAFNI datasets

DAFNI model

To build a docker image, install docker and check out this repository.

The Dockerfile defines how the model image is built. It uses a builder step with maven installed to build the transport jar, then creates a small image with java, the transport.jar and dafni-run.sh which runs the model.

To build, test locally, and export:

# build image
docker build -t nismod/transport:latest .

# run image using test data, outputs in current directory
docker run -it \
    -v "$PWD/tmp":/data/outputs \
    -v "$PWD/transport/src/test/resources/testdata":/data/inputs \
    -e ARGS='-c /data/inputs/config/testConfig.properties -b' \
    nismod/transport

# run second model step
docker run -it \
    -v "$PWD/tmp":/data/outputs \
    -v "$PWD/transport/src/test/resources/testdata":/data/inputs \
    -e ARGS='-c /data/inputs/config/testConfig.properties -road 2020 2015' \
    nismod/transport

# run image, get a bash shell
docker run -it nismod/transport /bin/bash

# export image for upload
docker save nismod/transport | gzip > transport.tar.gz

Then upload the transport.tar.gz file along with the dafni-model-definition.yml as a model to DAFNI.

DAFNI data

The DAFNI model uses "dataslots" to input the project data files. Initially, the test data package (in transport/src/test/resources/testdata) has been uploaded with separate dataslots for config, csvfiles, disruptions, interventions, routes and shapefiles.

Release checklist

Update the model version in transport/pom.xml
Run make to build model jar and testdata zip
Tag the latest commit (using git tag -a and git push --tags)
Make a GitHub release, with notes on fixes and new features

Contact information

Milan Lovric lovric.milan@gmail.com / M.Lovric@soton.ac.uk (Modelling and development)
Simon Blainey S.P.Blainey@soton.ac.uk (MISTRAL Co-Lead)
John Preston J.M.Preston@soton.ac.uk (MISTRAL Co-Lead)
Manuel Buitrago mbm1d15@soton.ac.uk (Seaports and freight)

Acknowledgments

This work has been undertaken at the University of Southampton, as part of the ITRC consortium, under grant EP/N017064/1 (MISTRAL: Multi-scale InfraSTRucture systems AnaLytics) of the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). https://www.itrc.org.uk/

The test resources contain a sample of data and shapefiles that come with the following licencing and copyright statements:

Open Government Licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

The authors acknowledge the use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility, and associated support services at the University of Southampton, in the completion of this work.

The implementation uses an open source library GeoTools for geospatial processing. http://www.geotools.org/about.html

aolifodaisy/transport