A Microsimulation Model for Residential Mobility: An Application to the City of Hamilton

Abstract

<p>URM-MicroSim is a prototype system for a micro simulation model of urban residential mobility. It is developed for the city of Mytilene, Greece. However, it is only a prototype and fails to meet the requirements of practical use, especially with regard to execution time. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis is first presented to fully understand the required improvements to the existing system. These are divided into functional and non-functional requirements, which are discussed separately. On the basis of the analysis, several functions (such as user interface and logging system) have been implemented and the time consuming functions were indentified and revised without affecting the simulation results. The revised system was tested for consistency in performance, and the results were convincing.</p> <p>Within this context, URM-MicroSim is calibrated for the city of Hamilton. The calibration methods include identifying the probabilities of demographic events and rebuilding the immigration sub-model. After URM-MicroSim is applied for Hamilton, simulation results from the system are validated against census data from Statistics Canada. Results from the validation provide evidence that URM-MicroSim is able to capture the overall trend of residential mobility at both aggregate and disaggregate levels. Lastly, some directions for future research are indicated, that focus on reducing system execution time and broadening the scope of the model.</p>