Alpaca: An Economic Evaluation Plug-In for Scenario Planning Tools

The Lincoln Institute for Land Policy
Case Studies in
Boston, MA Fresno, CA Los Angeles, CA

Description

In partnership with Pedro Donoso (University of Chile, Santiago), and with funding from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, Mr. Brown developed a software architecture for calculating economic performance measures using bid-rent land use models within scenario planning tools. This project included development of a new program (“mu-land”) implementing the same framework as the MUSSA land use model for Santiago. The software is 64-bit and can evaluate land uses at the parcel level, with no practical limit on the number of market segments or real estate types considered. Mr. Brown performed tests of this software using land use models and scenario planning data sets for three separate case study regions (Boston, Fresno, and Los Angeles) having three different scenario planning tools (CommunityViz, Envision Tomorrow+, and Urban Footprint). Mr. Brown also developed a scripting interface for the core mu-land software as well as a service-oriented architecture including a web services API permitting bid-rent models to be stored on the cloud and called from client applications.