Johan Barthelemy

Simulating Transport and Land Use Interdependencies for Strategic Urban Planning—An Agent Based Modelling Approach

Agent based modelling has been widely accepted as a promising tool for urban planning purposes thanks to its capability to provide sophisticated insights into the social behaviours and the interdependencies that characterise urban systems. In this paper, we report on an agent based model, called TransMob, which explicitly simulates the mutual dynamics between demographic evolution, transport demands, housing needs and the eventual change in the average satisfaction of the residents of an urban area. The ability to reproduce such dynamics is a unique feature that has not been found in many of the like agent based models in the literature. TransMob, is constituted by six major modules: synthetic population, perceived liveability, travel diary assignment, traffic micro-simulator, residential location choice, and travel mode choice. TransMob is used to simulate the dynamics of a metropolitan area in South East of Sydney, Australia, in 2006 and 2011, with demographic evolution. The results are favourably compared against survey data for the area in 2011, therefore validating the capability of TransMob to reproduce the observed complexity of an urban area. We also report on the application of TransMob to simulate various hypothetical scenarios of urban planning policies. We conclude with discussions on current limitations of TransMob, which serve as suggestions for future developments.

A Heuristic Combinatorial Optimisation Approach to Synthesising a Population for Agent-Based Modelling Purposes

This paper presents an algorithm that follows the sample-free approach to synthesise a population for agent based modelling purposes. This algorithm is among the very few in the literature that do not rely on a sample survey data to construct a synthetic population, and thus enjoy a potentially wider applications where such survey data is not available or inaccessible. Different to existing sample-free algorithms, the population synthesis presented in this paper applies the heuristics to part of the allocation of synthetic individuals into synthetic households. As a result the iterative process allocating individuals into households, which normally is the most computationally demanding and time consuming process, is required only for a subset of synthetic individuals. The population synthesiser in this work is therefore computational efficient enough for practical application to build a large synthetic population (many millions) for many thousands target areas at the smallest possible geographical level. This capability ensures that the geographical heterogeneity of the resulting synthetic population is best preserved. The paper also presents the application of the new method to synthesise the population for New South Wales in Australia in 2006. The resulting total synthetic population has approximately 6 million people living in over 2.3 million households residing in private dwellings across over 11000 Census Collection Districts. Analyses show evidence that the synthetic population matches very well with the census data across seven demographics attributes that characterise the population at both household level and individual level.

Synthetic Population Initialization and Evolution-Agent-Based Modelling of Population Aging and Household Transitions

A synthetic population (SP) aims at faithfully reproducing actual social entities, individuals and households, and their characteristics as described in a population census. Depending on the quality and completeness of the input data sets, as well as the number of variables of interest and hierarchical levels (usually, individual and household), a reliable SP should be able to reflect the actual physical social entities, with their characteristics and specific behavioural patterns. This paper presents a methodology to construct a reliable dynamic synthetic population for the Illawarra Region-Australia. The two main components in the population synthesizer presented in this paper are initialization and evolution. Iterative proportional fitting procedure (IPFP) is presented to help with the initialization of the population using 2011 Australian census. Then, population aging and evolution is projected using an agent-based modeling (ABM) technique over ten years.

Estimating Cross-Classified Population Counts of Multidimensional Tables: An Application to Regional Australia to Obtain Pseudo-Census Counts

Abstract Estimating population counts for multidimensional tables based on a representative sample subject to known marginal population counts is not only important in survey sampling but is also an integral part of standard methods for simulating area-specific synthetic populations. In this article several estimation methods are reviewed, with particular focus on the iterative proportional fitting procedure and the maximum likelihood method. The performance of these methods is investigated in a simulation study for multidimensional tables, as previous studies are limited to 2 by 2 tables. The data are generated under random sampling but also under misspecification models, for which sample and target populations differ systematically. The empirical results show that simple adjustments can lead to more efficient estimators, but generally, at the expense of increased bias. The adjustments also generally improve coverage of the confidence intervals. The methods discussed in this article along with standard error estimators, are made freely available in the R package mipfp. As an illustration, the methods are applied to the 2011 Australian census data available for the Illawarra Region in order to obtain estimates for the desired three-way table for age by sex by family type with known marginal tables for age by sex and for family type.

Interaction prediction between groundwater and quarry extension using discrete choice models and artificial neural networks

Groundwater and rock are intensively exploited in the world. When a quarry is deepened, the water table of the exploited geological formation might be reached. A dewatering system is therefore installed so that the quarry activities can continue, possibly impacting the nearby water catchments. In order to recommend an adequate feasibility study before deepening a quarry, we propose two interaction indices between extractive activity and groundwater resources based on hazard and vulnerability parameters used in the assessment of natural hazards. The levels of each index (low, medium, high, very high) correspond to the potential impact of the quarry on the regional hydrogeology. The first index is based on a discrete choice modeling methodology, while the second is relying on an artificial neural network. It is shown that these two complementary approaches (the former being probabilistic, while the latter fully deterministic) are able to predict accurately the level of interaction. Their use is finally illustrated by their application on the Boverie quarry and the Tridaine gallery located in Belgium. The indices determine the current interaction level as well as the one resulting from future quarry extensions. The results highlight the very high interaction level of the quarry with the gallery.