Abstract
In recent years, the use of agent-based modeling to tackle complex societal issue has led to the massive use of data to better represent the targeted system. A key question in the development of such models is the definition of the initial population. If many tools and methods already exist to generate a synthetic population from global and sample data, very few are really used in the social simulation field. One of the major reason for this fact is the difficulty of use of the existing tools and the lack of integrated tools in the modeling platforms used by modelers. To tackle this issue, we present in this paper a new generic tool, called Gen*, allowing to generate, localize and structure by a social network a synthetic population, directly usable in the GAMA agent-based modeling and simulation platform through its modeling language. The paper presents in details the three components of Gen* (generation, localization, structuring) as well as their use in the GAMA platform.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The extension can be directly downloaded from GAMA 1.8 at the https://www.irit.fr/genstar/p2updatesite/.
- 5.
Species is the GAML keyword representing a kind or a class of agents.
References
R.M. Axelrod, The complexity of cooperation: Agent-based models of competition and collaboration (Princeton University Press, 1997)
B. Edmonds, S. Moss, From KISS to KIDS in Multi-Agent and Multi-Agent Based Simulation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3415, 130–144 (2005)
S. Hassan, J. Pavon, N. Gilbert, Injecting data into simulation: Can agent-based modelling learn from microsimulation. In: World Congress of Soc. Simu. (2008)
A.G. Wilson, C.E. Pownall, A new representation of the urban system for modelling and for the study of micro-level interdependence. Area pp. 246–254 (1976)
F. Gargiulo, S. Ternes, S. Huet, G. Deffuant, An Iterative Approach for Generating Statistically Realistic Populations of Households. PLoS ONE 5(1), (2010)
F.F. Stephan, An iterative method of adjusting sample frequency tables when expected marginal totals are known. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 13(2), 166–178 (1942)
B. Farooq, M. Bierlaire, R. Hurtubia, G. Flötteröd, Simulation based population synthesis. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 58, 243–263 (2013)
Sun, L., Erath, A.: A bayesian network approach for population synthesis. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 61, 49–62 (2015-12)
P. Williamson, M. Birkin, P.H. Rees, The estimation of population microdata by using data from small area statistics and samples of anonymised records. Environment and Planning A 30(5), 785–816 (1998)
D. Voas, P. Williamson, An evaluation of the combinatorial optimisation approach to the creation of synthetic microdata. International Journal of Population Geography 6(5), 349–366 (2000)
S. Srinivasan, L. Ma, K. Yathindra, Procedure for forecasting household characteristics for input to travel-demand models (Tech. rep, Florida Department of Transportation, 2008)
N. Otani, K. Miyamoto, N. Sugiki, Goodness-of-fit evaluation method between observed and estimated sets of micro-data in land-use micro-simulation. Proceedings of CUPUM 9, (2009)
I. Bracken, D. Martin, The generation of spatial population distributions from census centroid data. Environment and Planning A 21(4), 537–543 (1989)
B. Bhaduri, E. Bright, P. Coleman, M.L. Urban, Landscan usa: a high-resolution geospatial and temporal modeling approach for population distribution and dynamics. GeoJournal 69(1–2), 103–117 (2007)
E. Holm, The SVERIGE spatial microsimulation model: content, validation, and example applications (Univ, Department of Social and Economic Geography, 2002)
G. Li, Q. Weng, Fine-scale population estimation: How landsat etm+ imagery can improve population distribution mapping. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing 36(3), 155–165 (2010)
A. Dmowska, T.F. Stepinski, High resolution dasymetric model of us demographics with application to spatial distribution of racial diversity. Applied Geography 53, 417–426 (2014)
K. Chapuis, P. Taillandier, M. Renaud, A. Drogoul, Gen*: a generic toolkit to generate spatially explicit synthetic populations. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 32(6), 1194–1210 (2018)
F. Amblard, A. Bouadjio-Boulic, C.S. Gutiérrez, B. Gaudou, Which models are used in social simulation to generate social networks?: a review of 17 years of publications in jasss. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Winter Simulation Conference. pp. 4021–4032. IEEE Press (2015)
T. Menezes, C. Roth, Symbolic regression of generative network models. Scientific reports 4, 6284 (2014)
S. Thiriot, J.D. Kant, Generate country-scale networks of interaction from scattered statistics. In: The 5th conference of the ESSA, Brescia, Italy. vol. 240 (2008)
J.P. Cointet, C. Roth, How realistic should knowledge diffusion models be? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 10(3), 5 (2007)
S. Gallagher, L.F. Richardson, S.L. Ventura, W.F. Eddy, Spew: Synthetic populations and ecosystems of the world. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 27(4), 773–784 (2018)
J. Barthelemy, P.L. Toint, Synthetic population generation without a sample. Transportation Science 47(2), 266–279 (2012)
R. Lovelace, M. Birkin, D. Ballas, E. van Leeuwen, Evaluating the performance of iterative proportional fitting for spatial microsimulation: New tests for an established technique. J. of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 18(2), 21 (2015)
J. Kim, S. Lee, A reproducibility analysis of synthetic population generation. Transportation Research Procedia 6, 50–63 (2015)
P. Williamson, An evaluation of two synthetic small-area microdata simulation methodologies: synthetic reconstruction and combinatorial optimisation. In: Spatial microsimulation: A reference guide for users, pp. 19–47. Springer
D.J. Watts, S.H. Strogatz, Collective dynamics of ‘small–world’ networks. nature393(6684), 440 (1998)
A.L. Barabási, R. Albert, H. Jeong, Scale-free characteristics of random networks: the topology of the world-wide web. Physica A: statistical mechanics and its applications 281(1–4), 69–77 (2000)
P.W. Holland, S. Leinhardt, An exponential family of probability distributions for directed graphs. J. of the American Statistical association 76(373), 33–50 (1981)
K. Chapuis, P. Taillandier, A brief review of synthetic population generation practices in agent-based social simulation. In: submitted to SSC2019, Social Simulation Conference 2019 (2019)
A. Grignard, P. Taillandier, B. Gaudou, D.A. Vo, N.Q. Huynh, A. Drogoul, GAMA 1.6: Advancing the art of complex agent-based modeling and simulation. In: International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. pp. 117–131. Springer (2013)
P. Taillandier, B. Gaudou, A. Grignard, Q.N. Huynh, N. Marilleau, P. Caillou, D. Philippon, A. Drogoul, Building, composing and experimenting complex spatial models with the gama platform. GeoInformatica (Dec 2018)
P. Taillandier, A. Grignard, N. Marilleau, D. Philippon, Q.N. Huynh, B. Gaudou, A. Drogoul et al., Participatory modeling and simulation with the gama platform. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 22(2), 1–3 (2019)
E. Daudé, C. Caron, K. Chapuis, A. Drogoul, B. Gaudou, S. Rey-Coyrehourq, A. Saval, P. Taillandier, P. Tranouez, J.D. Zucker, ESCAPE: Exploring by Simulation Cities Awareness on Population Evacuation. In: to appear in the Proceessing of the International Conference on Information Systems and for Crisis Response and Management. Springer (2019)
P. Fosset, A. Banos, E. Beck, S. Chardonnel, C. Lang, N. Marilleau, A. Piombini, T. Leysens, A. Conesa, I. Andre-Poyaud et al., Exploring intra-urban accessibility and impacts of pollution policies with an agent-based simulation platform: Gamirod. Systems 4(1), 5 (2016)
X. Ye, K. Konduri, R.M. Pendyala, B. Sana, P. Waddell, A methodology to match distributions of both household and person attributes in the generation of synthetic populations. In: 88th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC
Müller, K., Axhausen, K.W.: Hierarchical IPF: Generating a synthetic population for switzerland
Sun, L., Erath, A., Cai, M.: A hierarchical mixture modeling framework for population synthesis 114, 199–212. 10.1016/j.trb.2018.06.002
N. Watthanasutthi, V. Muangsin, Generating synthetic population at individual and household levels with aggregate data. In: 2016 13th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE). pp. 1–6. IEEE (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chapuis, K., Taillandier, P., Gaudou, B., Amblard, F., Thiriot, S. (2021). Gen*: An Integrated Tool for Realistic Agent Population Synthesis. In: Ahrweiler, P., Neumann, M. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. ESSA 2019. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61503-1_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61503-1_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-61502-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-61503-1
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)