Welcome to the Common Analytical Framework Handbook

Welcome to the Common Analytical Framework Handbook#

The Common Analytical Framework (often shortened to CAF) is a collaboration between England’s seven sub-national transport bodies to develop and maintain commonly used transport related analytical, appraisal and forecasting tools.

This handbook aims to document the current status, availability and usage of CAF modules. As such it is a living document, continually being updated as new content is released. We are extremely grateful for any feedback that you are able to provide on existing and future content. We are also open to contributions to this handbook where you think you can help. See here for the handbook repository, or click the GitHub icon above.

To get a quick overview on the current status of different CAF modules, see Package Status!

What To Expect From These Pages#

The aim is to produce a set of pages to help with the following:

  • Understand the CAF

    • Understand the current status and availability of various modules

    • Understand why the CAF is being developed the way it is

  • Guidance and Best Practice

    • Provide guidance on how to suggest edits or additions

    • Provide guidance on how to contribute edits or wholesale changes

  • Explain

    • Explain how to use the CAF through examples

    • Explain various data inputs and outputs to the CAF

  • Glossary

    • Document different terms and abbreviations

    • Explain some of the theory behind the modules

The Guidance and Best Practice and Glossary sections will be CAF focussed but aim to be generic enough to be useful more generally across software development and transport modelling. The glossary specifically aims to be a single source of truth and reference point across our transport models to help people new to the subject.

Help Us Improve#

One of key principles of the CAF is Linus’s Law, which states “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. We believe this principle also applies to these pages, we’re always looking for another set of eyeballs to show us where we may have made errors or omitted useful information. To this end, if you find any problems on these pages or think we need to add additional content please submit an Issue or Pull Request to our GitHub repo using the GitHub logo at the top of this page.

Credits#

This project is created using the excellent open source Jupyter Book project and the executablebooks/cookiecutter-jupyter-book template.

Contents