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+# AequilibraE
+
+[![Documentation](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/documentation.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/documentation.yml)
+
+[![unit tests](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/unit_tests.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/unit_tests.yml)
+
+[![Code coverage](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/test_linux_with_coverage.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/test_linux_with_coverage.yml)
+
+[![Linux builds](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_linux.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_linux.yml)
+
+[![MacOS buils](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_mac.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_mac.yml)
+
+[![Windows builds](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_windows.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_windows.yml)
+
+[![QAequilibraE artifacts](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_artifacts_qgis.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/AequilibraE/aequilibrae/actions/workflows/build_artifacts_qgis.yml)
+
+
+AequilibraE is the first comprehensive Python package for transportation modeling, and it aims to provide all the
+resources not available from other open-source packages in the Python (NumPy, really) ecosystem.
+
+## Comprehensive documentation
+
+[AequilibraE documentation built with Sphinx ](http://www.aequilibrae.com>)
+
+## What is available
+
+* Importing networks from OSM
+* Synthetic gravity/IPF
+* Traffic assignment (All-or Nothing, MSA, Frank-Wolfe, Conjugate Frank-Wolfe & Biconjugate-FrankWolfe)
+* Network Skimming & node-to-node path computation
+* Fast Matrix format based on NumPy
+* GTFS Import
+
+### What is available only in QGIS
+
+Some common resources for transportation modeling are inherently visual, and therefore they make more sense if
+available within a GIS platform. For that reason, many resources are available only from AequilibraE's 
+[QGIS plugin](http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/qaequilibrae/),
+which uses AequilibraE as its computational workhorse and also provides GUIs for most of AequilibraE's tools. Said tool
+is developed independently, although in parallel, and more details can be found in its 
+[GitHub repository](https://github.com/AequilibraE/qaequilibrae).
+
+
+### What is not planned to be available any time soon
+
+As AequilibraE's focus is to provide resources that are not yet available in the open source world, particularly the
+Python ecosystem, some important tools for transportation model won't be part of AequilibraE any time soon. Examples
+of this are:
+
+    * Discrete choice models - [BIOEGEME](http://biogeme.epfl.ch) , [LARCH](http://larch.newman.me)
+
+    * Activity-Based models - [ActivitySim](http://www.activitysim.org)
+
+## History
+
+Before there was AequilibraE, there was a need for something like AequilibraE out there.
+
+### The very early days
+
+It all started when I was a student at [UCI-ITS](www.its.uci.edu) and needed low level access to outputs of standard
+algorithms used in transportation modeling (e.g. path files from traffic assignment) and had that denied by the maker
+of the commercial software he normally used. There, the [first scratch of a traffic assignment procedure](www.xl-optim.com/python-traffic-assignment) was born.
+After that, there were a couple of scripts developed to implement synthetic gravity models (calibration and application)
+that were develop for a government think-tank in Brazil [IPEA](www.ipea.gov.br).
+Around the same time, another student needed a piece of code that transformed a GIS link layer into a proper graph,
+where each link would become the connection between two nodes.
+So there were three fundamental pieces that would come to be part of AequilibraE.
+
+### The first take on a release software
+
+Having all those algorithms at hand, it made sense combining them into something more people could use, and by them it
+seemed that QGIS was the way to go, so I developed the [very first version of AequilibraE](http://www.xl-optim.com/introducing_aequilibrae).
+
+It was buggy as hell and there was very little, if any, software engineering built into it, but it put Aequilibrae on
+the map.
+
+### The first reasonable version
+
+The first important thing I noticed after releasing AequilibraE was that the code was written in procedural style, even
+though it would make a lot more sense doing it in a Object-Oriented fashion, which let me down the path of creating the
+objects (graph, assignment results, matrix) that the software still relies on and were the foundation blocks of the
+proper API that is in the making. That [version was release in 2016](http://www.xl-optim.com/new-version-of-aequilibrae).
+
+### Evolving into proper software
+
+
+A few distinct improvements deserve to be highlighted.
+
+* The separation of the GUI and the Python library in [two repositories](http://www.xl-optim.com/separating-the-women-from-the-girls)
+* Introduction of Unit Tests and automatic testing using [Travis (replaced with GitHub Actions)](https://travis-ci.org/AequilibraE/aequilibrae)
+* Welcome of new collaborators: Jamie Cook, Andrew O'Brien, Yu-Chu Huang & Jan Zill
+* Introduction of style-checking with Flake8 and Black
+* Development of proper documentation and a recommended development virtual environment
+
+# QGIS Plugin
+
+The QGIS plugin is developed on a separate repository: [QGIS GUI](https://github.com/AequilibraE/qaequilibrae) 
+That is where everything started.