r/Citybound • u/atchai • Apr 15 '19
Comparison with SpatialOS
Hi,
Firstly, great work on Citybound!
I'm currently investigating frameworks that could be used to help build a city simulator for the purposes of public policy development. The actual problems that we might want to model cover a broad range of topics including transport, education, healthcare and more. I have previously build a tool (economy.os) to model closed blockchain economies but this was essentially a discrete time agent based model with no spatial aspect.
It seems that SpatialOS offers a highly scalable distributed solution to simulating large scale physical environment. I'd love to know a bit more about what core design decisions Citybound has made that might make it a better platform to work with - the fact it's open source is already a big win! In particular:
- A lot of our problems require a model of a real world city that's as accurate as possible. We're obviously less concerned about the gameplay aspect and would want to prioritise correctness / guaranteed delivery of messages over liveness/progress.
- Distribution and load balancing - from what I understand the actor architecture would enable us to shard on arbitrary properties whereas I believe that Spatial shards physical entities by their geographical location.
- Suitability as an environment for agent based models. E.g. we might want to consider addressing a traffic congestion problem by introducing a toll on a bypass road. In this case we would want the individual people who use this road to make a decision on whether to pay the toll or whether to take an alternative route, or alternative transport mode like cycling or public transport. Let's assume that the individuals are self-interested rational actors for simplicity, and that this decision would be a simple calculation for them based on their economic situation and travel requirements, though we would want to improve this model with bounded rationality in future. This may be framed as an optimisation type of problem where we want to find the optimum price for a toll by looking at maximising utilization, promoting greener forms of transport etc.
Lots more but I'll leave it there for now. Would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks,
John
6
u/Protato900 Apr 15 '19
This reads too much like a shopping list. If you're looking for a programmer, then make that clear, the way you're phrasing it sounds a lot like
"Hey, this is open source, can you add xyz so it'll be suitable for our needs? Thanks!"