ABM Hack is an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional hackathon for large-scale urban simulation session aims to draw on the collective knowledge of participants to build models of cycling behaviour into the Melbourne Activity Based Model (MABM).  MABM is the activity-based agent-based model developed by Infrastructure Victoria and will enable us to simulate the activities and travel of every person in Melbourne.  

Infrastructure Victoria have agreed to sponsor the event and will be providing us access to MABM.  MABM enables us to simulate the activities and travel of every person in Melbourne. Using the simulation, we can ask questions of this synthetic population that are difficult and/or costly to ask of the actual population.  To learn more about MABM, watch this video. 

Our focus for the event will be on active transport, focussing on cycling.  Our plan is to tap into the collective knowledge of hackathon participants to work out how we can build realistic models of cycling behaviour into MABM.  This then enables us to plan for and test the effects of particular interventions. To start with we’re investigating the effects of one of Victoria’s biggest new cycling infrastructure projects being built as part of the West Gate Tunnel Project. Bicycle network and neighbouring City Councils have kindly accepted to make their super count data  available for this event. 

Structure of the day: 

We’ll start the day with a few presentations and background information before moving on a collective problem-solving session.  After lunch we’ll then break out into smaller groups to work on implementing our ideas from the morning into the model.    

Requirements for the afternoon session: 

If you are attending in the afternoon session and want to participate in hacking activities, please make sure to bring your laptop with following software/platforms installed: 

Useful information for participants: 

Participants of this event are selected based on their expertise and background, if you are interested to participate, please email afshin.jafari@rmit.edu.au explaining your interest and a brief description about your background.

Where

VXLab, Ground floor of Building 91, RMIT University (110 Victoria St, Carlton) 

When

1 February 2019
9:30AM-4:30PM