Quoted from: Batty, Michael, and Richard Milton. "A new framework for very large-scale urban modelling." Urban Studies, Vol 58, Issue 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0042098020982252 

The model is called QUANT, which stands for Quantitative Urban ANalytics forecasTing or some variant thereof, and its underlying architecture is based on Microsoft.Net Core 3. This allows portability to other platforms, with the server-side web mapping (MSOA Vector Tiler) and the QUANT model being developed in C#. The website and its user interface use Angular 8 with NodeJS on the server side. The combination of .Net Core with NodeJS and Angular is a common design pattern which is geared towards developing complex Single Page Applications (SPA) such as those required to provide a web-based GIS with the capability to visualise the model outputs of QUANT immediately. If we take the model in equations (1) to (4), then each trip and cost matrix {Tmij}{Tijm} and {cmij}cijm} which comprises three modes and is based on 8436 zones (as we detail below for England, Scotland and Wales) involves some 427 million floating-point values and this is far too computationally intensive to accomplish on the browser, for it would require 1.6 GB of data to be downloaded. As a result, all modelling functionality is built into the server as a set of web services and these form a ‘model view controller’ architecture which we consider as the basis of ‘Urban Modelling as a Service’. All this is implicit in Figure 1, which shows that the framework can be used for models other than QUANT, with different client-side visualisations other than web-based maps being possible, in this case software from ERSI’s City Engine and a client built around the Unity game engine running on a 55-inch capacitive touch table.