GRACIO

Repo for documentation and specification of GRACIO/Grasbrook CityScopes

Description

This page is for collecting all overarching specification and documentation of the combined but dispersed endeavours of building a CityScope for the Grasbrook competition. Interfaces of the infrastructures are defined here, as well as general to-dos and responsibilities.

Infrastracture

CityIO is the central point of knowledge. All data is stored there. table data the front-end and some simulation models require the grid to be represented as geodata (GeoJSON). CityIO_to_geoJSON does the conversion from table meta parameters (lat, lon, number of cells/rows, cell dimensions) to a GeoJSON containing the right set of quadruatic polygons.

Interfaces

• grid as array of {type:int, rotation:int}, index reference frame
• grid as GeoJSON, geo reference frame
• simulation outpus as various (preferably GeoJSON?)

Cell Properties

Cells are represented in CityIO by their array index, a rotation (int) and a type (int). Types can be a big number of (almost) arbitrary property combinations (i.e. isBuilding=true and numStories=4). These properties might have conditions to be applicable (i.e. numStories is only relevant for buildings). The mapping from the integer type stored in the grid to the actual dictionary of properties set should be represented by hashing. That means every unique combination of properties has a unique hash.

Also, the names and the possible values and the conditions of properties have to be specifically defined and immutable! Otherwise the front-end doesn't know what UI-elements to display and the simulation models don't know what values they can work with.

Draft for possible properties

The type mapping works as seen here.

To Do

specification

• make a more pretty schematic
• decide on wether GeoJSON grids contain properties or if they should be obtained from the grid array instead (reasoning: geoJSONs get really big, might make sense to only create once at startup and get/send data (cell types) only on index-referenced-grid basis)

front-end

• previous states of grid?

Simulation modules

• define inferred and assumed parameters
• write more
• how to trigger these to run

Open Questions

• Do we provide import tools?

Deployment

• User manual
• host the front-end
• host the back-end
• distribute access codes