This will be an informal hackathon on generating, modelling and modifying geographic representations of transport networks.

The hackathon will be held on TBC from 11:00 to 17:00 at the ATI.

The event will be split into 2 parts: demo of existing tools plus sharing of ideas and the hackathon itself. The rough timings will be as follows (these can be adjusted on the day):

• 11:00 - 11:05: Introduction and welcome (Robin Lovelace)

• 11:05 - 12:00: Demo of existing tools and sharing of ideas

  • 11:05 - 11:20: Demo of od2net tool developed at the ATI (Dustin Carlino)
  • 11:20 - 11:30: Demo of network simplification and joining algorithms and prototype tools (Robin Lovelace)
  • 11:30 - 11:45: Demo of walkability, cyclability, accessibility and traffic stress estimation methods for routing and network generation/analysis (Chris Conlan)
  • 11:45 - 12:00: Discussion of ideas for the hackathon, team formation

• 12:00 - 13:00: Lunch

• 13:00 - 16:00: Hackathon

• 16:00 - 17:00: Presentations and discussion

• To join the hackathon remotely join the Teams meeting (email Robin, Dustin or Chris for the link)
• Focus on GitHub for issues: any questions welcome on the issue tracker
• Forking the repo and contributions welcome and encouraged for sharing code
• Please don’t commit and push big files to the repo: use releases instead, see https://github.com/Robinlovelace/netgenhack/releases for input datasets

• Writing new rules to generate LTS or other measures of network quality from OSM data
• Testing network simplification on OSM to see possible benefits from a policy perspective
• Testing out od2net on different datasets and test cases
• Get command-line interfaces to od2net working

We will use existing input datasets including:

• OpenStreetMap
• Ordnance Survey Open Roads
• OD data (2011 and 2021) from WICID

Although these datasets are available nationally we will provide subsets of them for ease of use:

• Small area (e.g. covering ATI and direct surroundings)
• Medium area (e.g. covering York)
• Large area (e.g. covering Yorkshire and the Humber)

The hackathon will be an opportunity to develop new tools and ideas for network generation and analysis. It will also build skills and foster collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the field.

• Skills development: hackathons are a great way to learn new skills and share knowledge, especially with new tools such as the od2net tool developed at the ATI and network simplification tools developed at the University of Leeds (see https://nptscot.github.io/networkmerge/ for details)
• New tools and better documentation and understanding: we hope the hackathon will lead to a step change in some of the tools available for network generation and analysis, including
  • Better documentation of the od2net and network simplification tools
  • More use cases, identification of bugs and improvements to the tools
• Ideas for future work
  • How the tools can be used in policy
  • Research directions