Project Meeting 2023.03.02

Agenda

• Road Map
  • Discuss list of potential initial interviewees and topics
  • Present annotated outline for Roadmap
    • Draft for discussion: activitysim-roadmap-interim-items-feb-2023.docx

Action Items

• WSP to provide more specific interview prompts before being given green light to conduct interviews
• Interviewee list still to be determined, but the bolded people on the interviewee list of the draft document are priorities
• Add estimate of levels of effort for each section in the annotated outline to understand how resources will be allocated

Meeting Notes

• Interviews
  • Scope of people to interview
    • Initial list includes consortium members, ActivitySim users but not consortium members, academics, software vendors
    • Could add users of trip-based model users that haven't moved to ABMs yet (i.e., Marty Milkvoits at CTPS)
    • Noted that the list is long and seems like it would require a lot of resources to conduct this part of the roadmap. Suggestions for reducing resources:
      • Reduce the number of interviewees and focus on ActivitySim consortium members
      • Non-consortium interviewees be pooled/batched according to common backgrounds (i.e., academics)
      • Have an in-person meeting/lunch with many people at the Innovations in Travel Analysis and Planning conference in June in Indianapolis
      • Prioritize interviewees and then assess value of additional interviewees later
    • Suggestion to provide topics/prompts to interviewees ahead of time so that they can think about the topics and engage various staff in different aspects of the conversation. This process would also work well if we wanted to solicit feedback via email only, which could be a more efficient use of resources.
  • Topics/prompts
    • Could include questions about ancillary travel models and/or land use models.
• Annotated outline
  • Concern that the outline is too broad and could spin out. Suggestion to focus on informing next phase of scoping and update the roadmap with each scoping effort.
    • Recommendation to estimate levels of effort for each section to understand how resources will be allocated
  • Address product versus project management and how they interact with section 3.2.3
  • Do we need the market scan section?
    • Consensus that it’s not a high priority but mixed opinions on level of importance
    • WSP doesn't plan for this to be a resource intensive section. The bench consultants have a good sense of the market already.
    • Suggestion to keep the Market Scan section but scale down in some way
  • The roadmap was suggested to be a living document. Related, it was proposed that the roadmap could spin off to a handful of discrete docs that people could curate over time, managed by different groups of the consortium.