Household Location Modelling Using Spatial Microsimulation

School of Geography, University of Leeds


Principal Investigators:

Prof Graham Clarke
Prof John Stillwell
Phil Gibson
Jianhui Jin
Dr Dimitris Ballas (Sheffield)
David Simmonds (David Simmonds Consultancy)
Olga Feldman (David Simmonds Consultancy)

Dates:

2004 -

Grant:

Department for Transport

Summary:

This project is concerned with the development and use of a static and dynamic spatial microsimulation model aiming at ultimately achieving a better understanding of households’ residential location behaviour. The first task has been to create a synthetic population for the base year of 1991. The well established method of simulated annealing has been fine-tuned and implemented to generate small area microdata on the basis of the 1991 SARs and ward level 1991 small area population statistics. The next major task has been to update the number and characteristics of its individuals and households. This updating is being carried out for successive time units, the simulation period currently divided into one-year intervals from 1991 to 2001. It should be noted that the dynamics of population over time comprise several demographic and socio-economic processes: births, deaths, migrations, job change, marital status change, residential location change.


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