Performance Optimization and Scaling for Simulations of Urban Planning**

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The Black Arcs Inc. is a civic technology company with their main focus on the visualization of real urban areas in a "video-game" format. They provide a tool called CitiSketch that visualizes whole communities in order to address civic issues. This technology simulates "scenarios" on urban planning decisions and presents the impacts in real-time. For example, the location of a school in a specific region can produce different traffic patterns. With this simulation model, it becomes possible to address and visualize the impacts on the every day life of the citizens and also, decide the location that will have the most positive impact to the community. To achieve this, the software models individual people in the city as independent agents that perform duties/activities as a person would in real-life. The software currently shows different planning strategies for towns with populations up to 10,000 people. For larger populations, the tool suffers from performance degradation due to the large number of agents that are acting independently and the subsequent computing workload it requires. The simulation requires life-like agents to model people; therefore population size reflects the number of agents, which reflects the computing demand and limits the city size. Overall, the software has scaling issues that need to be addressed and resolved in order to make it applicable for urban areas of any population size.