Integrating GIS and FEATHERS: A Conceptual Design

This study proposes integrating GIS and FEATHERS in order to improve the capability of data management, spatial analysis and visualization in the model framework. GIS provides geodatabase for effectively storing and edit (non-)spatial data, useful functions of spatial analysis for defining spatial interactions between phenomena simulated by the modeling system, and interactive visualization tools. Thus, this study mainly focuses on three topics: i) why FEATHERS needs a GIS module, ii) how the GIS module is designed, and iii) what functions can be supported by the GIS module in the FEATHERS system. Moreover, we overview some transportation software adopting GIS to catch up a general trend in GIS and transportation and also suggest data schema for creating geodatabase and a source code for making map layers and map tools in python. At the end, we conclude this paper with summary and plan for the future work.