TRANSIMS: Applications and Development Workshop

April 8–9, 2010
Advanced TRANSIMS visualizations - TransVis capabilities and usage
Michael Hope
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory

List of Authors
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Michael Hope
Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center
Argonne National Laboratory
277 International Drive
West Chicago, IL 60185

Abstract
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TRANSIMS is an extremely powerful software package in terms of both the breadth and depth of its analysis. However, there has been relatively little development in the capability to quickly and easily visualize the output of TRANSIMS. Detailed in this presentation is an emerging TRANSIMS Visualizer called TransVis. This software has several important design elements. First, it has many of the important standard GIS capabilities to import shape layers, color them, change the opacity, and interactively pan and zoom. The software also allows camera movements in 3D so a simulation can be viewed from all sides and angles. Next, it allows interactive viewing of TRANSIMS microsimulation results with the ability to easily jump to any time in the simulation and to move forward in time. TransVis has also pioneered several novel visualization techniques which aid in the examination of TRANSIMS results - all are available interactively. Finally, the software can record frames from what is played interactively and render them as standard movies.

Biography
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Michael Hope has been employed by Argonne-TRACC for nearly three years, one of those years as a graduate student. Michael Hope has an educational background in industrial engineering, simulation, algorithm design, and operations research mathematics. At TRACC he has worked in several core areas related to TRANSIMS development and deployment. These include evacuation modeling and methodology design, TRANSIMS source code parallelization, and most recently development of the TransVis (TRANSIMS Visualizer) software.