INTRANCES project complete

The EU-funded INTRANCES project (Grant agreement ID: 886050) has been completed. A summery of results and key project outputs can be accessed here.

Richard J Hewitt wishes to thank the European Commission for funding the project through a H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellowship and the host supervisor at the Madrid Complutense University, Juan Carlos García Palomares. The project is also very grateful for the kind assistance of numerous collaborators, especially: Charlotte Astier (Observatorio para Una Cultura del Territorio), Mike Batty (University College London), Rafael Borge (Madrid Polytechnic Univeristy), Eduardo Caramés (Observatorio para Una Cultura del Territorio), Hedwig Van Delden (RIKS), Julio Lumbreras (Madrid Polytechnic University), Tim Oxley (Imperial College London), Nick P. Winder (retired), Mark Zuidgeest (University of Cape Town).

We gratefully acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the following master’s degree students who worked on various aspects of the project at various times: Javier Antolín Asenjo, Ramón Díez Rodríguez, Julio-José Pérez-Bello Piñeiro, Javier Valbuena González (Master’s dissertations); Juan Balea-Aneiros, Eduardo Caramés, Sergio González Minguito, Lidia Moya Sánchez, Javier Valbuena González, Claudia Alejandra Aranda Andrades, Zuleyka Zoraya Campaña Huertas (Master’s practice work placements). Without them the project could not have been completed successfully.

Finally, we are very grateful for the numerous expert stakeholders, in governement, civil society, private practice and research institutions who contributed their free time to the project.

Final workshop of the INTRANCES project. Photo: Claudia Alejandra Aranda Andrades

SIMLANDER v2.0 released!

We are happy to announce the release of a new version of SIMLANDER, designed for running multiple simulations using different model configurations. Click here to download a zip file with demo data and instructions.

The only important changes with respect to earlier versions are:

1) the addition of a batch script shortcut with a desktop icon to launch RScript without needing to open R directly (windows only – linux and Mac users will need to enter the main directory and launch simcontrol.R from the R command line) ;

2) a new simulation dialog (below) programmed in tcltk, which requires the gWidgets2tcltk package;

3) a range of new algorithms to calculate the transition potential, see our recently-published Open Access paper in International Journal of Geographical Information Science for more details on this.

Detailed instructions on running the new version can be found inside the zip file “README_how_to_run_SIMLANDER_model.txt”

Above: SIMLANDER v.2.0 command line (left), windows explorer (middle) and RPlots.pdf result (right).

INTRANCES project workshop

The final participatory workshop of the INTRANCES project was carried out on 22^nd June 2022 with stakeholders from Cambiamo cooperative, the Regional Transport Consortium of Madrid, the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and Madrid City Council, and facilitated by staff from Observatorio para una Cultura del Territorio and students from the Masters’ degree programme on “Smart and Sustainable Cities” from the Complutense University of Madrid. In the participatory workshop, participants evaluated the four scenarios that had been developed through three detailed participatory activities. Central to the participatory evaluation was the application of a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) methodology to analyze the viability of different transport strategies arising from the four participatory scenarios developed by the project stakeholders. The workshop report is available here.

Above: Zuleyka Zoraya Campaña Huertas, Master’s student in Smart and Sustainable Cities, explains Scenario 1: Remote Working to workshop participants. Photo: Claudia Alejandra Aranda Andrades.

Above: workshop participants discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the 4 scenarios. Photo: Claudia Alejandra Aranda Andrades.

INTRANCES project update

INTRANCES Project deliverables D.1 and D.2, relating to ethical considerations and data protection regulations have been submitted successfully to the European Commission and are either approved or awaiting approval.    

The semi-structured interview phase of the project is currently ongoing, projected to come to an end in May 2021. This phase aims to collect opinions, perspectives and advice from stakeholders involved in transport, especially with respect to its relationship with air quality, energy and urban planning in the city of Madrid. The interviews were structured around the following questions:

1. What are the key challenges for environmental sustainability related with transport in Madrid?

2. What solutions can be proposed to address these challenges?

3. What sources of data are available for a) integrated modelling of transport, b) land use, c) air quality and d) emissions in Madrid.

4. Who are the most important actors (institutions or groups) in successfully addressing these key challenges, and to which broad sector do they belong (public, private, third sector, hybrid/other (some combination of first three))

5. Can you suggest any key contacts who might be able to assist us with any aspect of the project? (especially: policy makers, regulators or practitioners)  

6. (Policymakers only) What are the policy ambitions regarding environmental sustainability and transport  and how can progress towards set targets be measured? (e.g. national or EU policy targets)

As of 28 April 2021, six semi-structured interviews have so far been conducted by Richard Hewitt and Charlotte Astier with various groups of stakeholders including transport managers and planners, transport consortium representatives, sustainable transport advocates and researchers.

At the same time, we are conducting a review of the literature on experiences and recent cases in the cities of the world with sustainable mobility.

The next part of the project involves spatial model development for visualisation and simulatation of the qualitative scenarios developed from the stakeholder interview phase. Three sub-projects relating to this objective are currently being carried out by UCM master’s degree programme students as part of their Master’s degree dissertations, as follows:

Planificación urbana para reducir exposición a la contaminación del aire: análisis de trade-offs para el caso de Madrid (Urban planning to reduce exposure to air pollution: analysis of trade-offs for the case of Madrid). – Javier Antolín Asenjo

Accesibilidad dinámica en modelos de autómata celular (AC) de usos del suelo urbano. (Dynamic Accessibility in Cellular Automata urban land use models) – Julio-José Pérez-Bello Piñeiro

¿Cómo optimizar la distribución de alimentos locales? Un modelo de decisión multicriterio para productores locales de la bioregión de Madrid.  (How to optimise local food distribution? A multi-criteria decision model for local produces in the Madrid Bioregion). – Javier Valbuena González (Jointly supervised by Verónica Hernández Jiménez, Observatorio para una Cultura del Territorio)

APoLUS 9.5.4 released (new zoning block)

Problems with ZONING/zoning.R. I’ve rewritten the script which now should work as expected.

APoLUS updated version (9.5.3) released

This is a simple fix – but deserves a new sub version number (9.5.3) because its a crucial update. Scripts have now been updated to reflect the loss of gWidgetstcltk from the CRAN repositories and its replacement gWidgets2tcltk. Thanks Naveen for reminding me to do this!

Link to new version APoLUS 9.5.3

INTRANCES project begun

We recently began work on the EU-funded INTRANCES project (Grant agreement ID: 886050). Under INTRANCES, an integrated scenario model including transport, urban land use and air pollution wil be developed based on the SIMLANDER and APoLUS modelling tools.

Developments, publications and links to download open access resources, like datasets and tools used by the project, will be reported on this site on the dedicated project web page.

Package gWidgets2tcltk replaces gWidgetstcltk

I just noticed that I can no longer install the gWidgetstcltk package because it is no longer maintained in the CRAN repository.

Without this package APoLUS will give you an error because quite a few scripts contain the commands:

library(gWidgetstcltk)

or:

require(gWidgetstcltk)

Fortunanately, this error can be fixed by installing gWidgets2tcltk instead and correcting the scripts that caused the problem to require gWidgets2tcltk instead. Off hand, this includes SWITCH/switchb.R, NHOOD/selectmatlist.R and probably one or two others. You will easily be able to tell, because the script will fail telling you that gWidgetstcltk could not be loaded..

I’ll fix this in the next version of APoLUS..

APoLUS/SIMLANDER updated versions released

APoLUS 9.5.2 is now available, with new scripts for accessibility, suitability and zoning to make calibration easier, and an error in the accessibility calculation corrected. See this post.

The user guide has also been updated. It is included in the download package for the new version and can also be accessed separately here.

A new version of SIMLANDER, version 1.0.6, is now also available.

SIMLANDER/APOLUS course at Deakin University, Melbourne, Feb 3rd-7th 2020

I was recently invited to Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, by Professor Brett Bryan to give a course on land use modelling in R using the SIMLANDER/APoLUS framework to the Land Use Futures modelling group.

Seemed to go down well, students were very engaged and got on well with the model. Fun had by all, including me.

One bright participant noticed a stupid error in the accessibility calculation. This can be summarized as follows:

1. I’d mistyped White’s et al’s (1997) accessibility equation. The correct equation is to be found here on the updated accessibility page of this website.

2. I was entirely wrong about the way to put the coefficient into the equation. It’s a single number, not a reclassified distance map. Of course, if you don’t want to use the accessibility equation, you can of course, reclassify the distance map. But not both!

The correct procedure is described as follows here

Over the coming days I will correct this error in the script in SIMLANDER and APOLUS, and post an update when I do this…..