Agenda
- Admin
- Review of recent technical work / issues
Notes
Meeting Schedule Restructuring
Joe (Zephyr) summarized recent overhaul of the consortium's meeting cadence, motivated by a desire to make participation more accessible for Australian agencies. Key changes:
- The former all-hands meeting has been repurposed as a partners-only meeting, now occurring every three weeks rather than monthly.
- Tuesday meetings now alternate between 11 AM and 2 PM Pacific, making some sessions more compatible with Australian time zones (approximately 7–9 AM Sydney/Melbourne time).
- Engineering team meetings on Thursday also now alternate between 11 AM and 2 PM Pacific
The tradeoff acknowledged: 2 PM Pacific pushes to 5 PM Eastern, which is challenging for East Coast US members. The consensus was to keep the monthly Australia Team meeting on the calendar for now, monitor whether the new timeslots allow sufficient integration into the main meetings, and revisit as needed. Amir noted he hadn't been able to join engineering meetings in the past two months but observed that Friday's engineering meeting was scheduled at a compatible time.
Consultant Bench Re-Procurement (RFQ)
This was the substantive focus of the meeting. The existing bench was procured in 2021 for a 2.5-year initial term plus up to three years of optional extensions — putting the consortium at or near the end of that window. Several agencies also raised procurement compliance concerns (including potentially with U.S. federal dollar requirements) about adding new firms without re-procurement.
Consensus: Proceed with a new Request for Qualifications (RFQ) as soon as possible, targeting issuance within the next three months.
Key design decisions discussed:
- Drop hypothetical task responses — the prior RFQ asked firms to respond to sample task scopes. Given five-plus years of established working relationships, this is no longer considered necessary and adds burden on both reviewers and respondents.
- Expand the bench — rather than limiting to a small number of firms, the group favored a broader bench to avoid vendor lock-in, increase competition, and accommodate procurement rules (e.g., SANDAG cannot add firms to a bench after it is established).
- Include computational expertise — there have been recurring issues (e.g., anomalous performance on different hardware platforms) that require deeper computer science knowledge. Rather than a separate bench, the preference is to include this as an explicit competency area within a single RFQ.
- Consider academic/university partners — Shaun raised TfNSW's engagement with University of Sydney (MATSim–ActivitySim integration) and UNSW (e-shopping module). The group discussed adding universities or research institutes to the bench or vendor outreach list, noting the potential for low-cost PhD student labor, but flagging potentially high university overhead rates and delivery risks as considerations.
Action items:
- Australian agencies (TfNSW, DTP, VicRoads) to share existing procurement documents and panel templates where permissible.
- All agencies to contribute to a shared vendor list for RFQ distribution.
- Next partners-only meeting (in 3 weeks, at 2 PM Pacific) will include a broader group discussion on RFQ design.
Technical Updates
Automated Calibration Memo: RSG shared a 26-page design memo (circulated late last week). Reviewers were asked to provide feedback within two weeks so RSG can receive comments before their upcoming presentation. Amir requested that the document be posted to GitHub as a Markdown file to enable inline commenting — a workaround for TfNSW's Google Drive access restrictions. Joe agreed to attempt the conversion and initiate a GitHub discussion thread.
Telecommute Frequency Model: RSG presented an update the prior week. Initial estimation results showed an unexpected sign on the log sum term; additional data cleaning is underway and revised results will be circulated.
Random Number Generation: Work is ongoing but assessed as delivering incremental improvement rather than a step change — estimated runtime reduction of ~15%. Poisson sampling was highlighted as the more impactful development, particularly for improving EET runtime performance relative to non-EET methods.
Disaggregate Accessibility Bug: Jan Zill's prior investigation surfaced a long-standing issue in disaggregated accessibility calculations. Impact is limited to that component, though agencies such as PSRC are among those using it. A follow-up meeting with Jan and Jeff is being planned to discuss resolution.
Agency Update Schedule
TfNSW (Amir) volunteered to present at the June 2 meeting, which is an Australia-compatible timeslot. No advance materials required. Other open slots remain in August and late September for additional agency presentations.
Sharrow Implementation Experiences
Added to the agenda at Amir's request. Joe will reach out to other agencies that have adopted Sharrow (including SANDAG) to organize a broader discussion, potentially as soon as the following Tuesday meeting. Shaun noted that an external team has been exploring AI-assisted conversion of TfNSW's existing ABM to be Sharrow-compatible.
Agenda
Notes
Meeting Schedule Restructuring
Joe (Zephyr) summarized recent overhaul of the consortium's meeting cadence, motivated by a desire to make participation more accessible for Australian agencies. Key changes:
The tradeoff acknowledged: 2 PM Pacific pushes to 5 PM Eastern, which is challenging for East Coast US members. The consensus was to keep the monthly Australia Team meeting on the calendar for now, monitor whether the new timeslots allow sufficient integration into the main meetings, and revisit as needed. Amir noted he hadn't been able to join engineering meetings in the past two months but observed that Friday's engineering meeting was scheduled at a compatible time.
Consultant Bench Re-Procurement (RFQ)
This was the substantive focus of the meeting. The existing bench was procured in 2021 for a 2.5-year initial term plus up to three years of optional extensions — putting the consortium at or near the end of that window. Several agencies also raised procurement compliance concerns (including potentially with U.S. federal dollar requirements) about adding new firms without re-procurement.
Consensus: Proceed with a new Request for Qualifications (RFQ) as soon as possible, targeting issuance within the next three months.
Key design decisions discussed:
Action items:
Technical Updates
Automated Calibration Memo: RSG shared a 26-page design memo (circulated late last week). Reviewers were asked to provide feedback within two weeks so RSG can receive comments before their upcoming presentation. Amir requested that the document be posted to GitHub as a Markdown file to enable inline commenting — a workaround for TfNSW's Google Drive access restrictions. Joe agreed to attempt the conversion and initiate a GitHub discussion thread.
Telecommute Frequency Model: RSG presented an update the prior week. Initial estimation results showed an unexpected sign on the log sum term; additional data cleaning is underway and revised results will be circulated.
Random Number Generation: Work is ongoing but assessed as delivering incremental improvement rather than a step change — estimated runtime reduction of ~15%. Poisson sampling was highlighted as the more impactful development, particularly for improving EET runtime performance relative to non-EET methods.
Disaggregate Accessibility Bug: Jan Zill's prior investigation surfaced a long-standing issue in disaggregated accessibility calculations. Impact is limited to that component, though agencies such as PSRC are among those using it. A follow-up meeting with Jan and Jeff is being planned to discuss resolution.
Agency Update Schedule
TfNSW (Amir) volunteered to present at the June 2 meeting, which is an Australia-compatible timeslot. No advance materials required. Other open slots remain in August and late September for additional agency presentations.
Sharrow Implementation Experiences
Added to the agenda at Amir's request. Joe will reach out to other agencies that have adopted Sharrow (including SANDAG) to organize a broader discussion, potentially as soon as the following Tuesday meeting. Shaun noted that an external team has been exploring AI-assisted conversion of TfNSW's existing ABM to be Sharrow-compatible.