asim integration with commercial travel modeling packages

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Many agencies manage and run their overall travel model through one of the commercial travel modeling packages. To make integration with activitysim easier for these agencies, we should start to think about how activitysim will integrate with these platforms.

Similar to the OMX effort, which resulted in each major commercial platform supporting OMX, we could work with each company to implement a standard approach to integration.

Currently, the activitysim example model is run on the command line, is configured through yaml files, and expects all inputs to be in OMX and CSV format. It also writes all final outputs to OMX and CSV format. OMX and CSV import/export is already supported by every major commercial platform.

The next step in the integration is an activitysim model runner/wrapper, which would allow for configuring and running any activitysim framework model from within the commercial platform. For EMME this would probably be an activitysim toolbox (which is also implemented in Python). For VISUM, this would probably be an activitysim AddIn (which is also implemented in Python). For TransCAD, this would probably be a custom GISDK-based user interface. For Cube, this would probably be a series of Application Manager steps + Cube scripts.