tomslee/ridehail

Exploratory animation of ridehailing models

Ridehail simulation

This is a personal project. You're welcome to use it but no guarantees.

Installing

Prerequisites

This README assumes that you are familiar with the Windows or Linux command line, have git installed, and have python installed. I have used the anaconda distribution.

To check you have the prerequisites:

• At the command prompt, confirm you have git installed. Your output may be a bit different.

  git --version� git version 2.34.1.windows.1

• At the command prompt, confirm you have python installed

  python --version Python 3.9.7

Some features of the program require python 3.8 or later.

Clone the project and install packages

Clone the project into a directory where you will run the application. I use the src/ directory under my home directory.

src > git clone https://github.com/tomslee/ridehail-animation.git src > cd ridehal-animation

You will need to install some packages used by the project. I can't lead you through all the variations here, but you can try one of the following and Google if you get stuck:

• If you are using Anaconda python on Linux:

    > conda create --name ridehail --file conda-spec-file-linux.txt

• If youa re using Anaconda python on Windows:

    > conda create --name ridehail --file conda-spec-file-windows.txt

• Another thing to try

    > pip install -r requirements.txt

Running a simulation in the browser

The project uses pyodide, which is brilliant, to run the python code in the browser. The code for this is in the web folder.

Here are instructions for running it in a local browser. At sometime I'll host it somewhere.

First you do have to build the ridehail package, which makes a wheel file in the dist folder. I think you then have to install it locally. Later on I hope to serve it from github.

> python -m build
> pip install dist/ridehail-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl --force-reinstall

THen start a web server from the /web directory:

> cd web
> python -m http.server > /dev/null 2>&1 &

At least, that command runs the server silently and in the background in Linux. Just try python -m http.server in a separate console if you're on Windows or want to see output.

Running a simulation

• Read example.config
• Make a copy of example.config, eg <username>.config
• Run "python run.py <username>.config" (or whatever you called it)
• Try making other changes to your config files

There is also a set of example files in the config directory and the walthrough directory. You can run these with, for example:

    > python run.py walkthrough/step1_map.config

Arguments supplied on the command line (not available for all configuration options, but for some) override those in the configuration file. You can, for example, suppress graphical display by using "-dr None" no matter what is in the configuration file. For information command line options, run

    python run.py --help

Creating your own simulations

Each simulation is managed by a configuration file. You can either copy an existing configuration file or generate a new one with the following commands:

python run.py -wc my_simulation.config

You can call it anything you want, but the extension .config is standard.

If you edit your configuration file in a text editor you should see each parameter has a description.

Documentation

There are notes on some of the background to this project in the doc folder:

• Background
• Cities
• Benchmark
• Notes