Larry A. Moralez
Using Smart Technology to Improve Dog Park Quality
Having clean and healthy dog parks for city dwellers that frequent them improves quality of life for owners and their pets. For instance, the Lake Eola dog park near my home is converted from grass to dirt as people and dogs visit. The dogs and their owners often become filthy. What's more, the dust from the running dogs is often times thrown into the air and, subseqeuntly, the eyes of the visitors. This is incredibly painful, especially for children. The city does not have an effective means to control the destruction of the grass at the park. Instead, they choose to send a mainenance crew to assess the issue when enough complaints pile in. Large areas of the park are roped off (making no difference to our canine friends) while it is being fixed. During this repair period the parks recieve far fewer visitors than usual, and dogs and their owners have fewer opportunities to socialize.
A smart city leverages technology to engender sustainable development and thereby enriches the lives of its citzens. My city currently faces an issue of chronic destruction of its dog park grass. If the city were to employ sensor technology to track the activity of the park goers and their pets, they could more accurately predict the grass destruction and implement cost saving preventitive measures rather than long and arduous repairs.
I have chosen to use AnyLogic to conduct an agent-based simulation of the decay and growth of dog park grass in the cities major dog parks. Additional information can be found in my Analysis file in the analysis folder.
Each file for my Code Template can be found here.
Here I provide Object and Class diagrams of the Portable Organic Trouble-free Self-watering System (POTS) Model and provide a source code template.
