A Design of Large-Scale Agent-based Demographic Microsimulation Framework

Abstract

In traditional agent-based simulation system, the number of agents and simulation time are not critical issues, because the systems perform with only small part of the data. However, the number of agents and simulation speed are important factors in large-scale agent-based simulation and high speed simulation domain. In this paper, we describe design issues of the large- scale agent-based simulation framework for demographic and welfare. Keyword: Agent based modeling, large-scale simulation, demographic simulation, simulation framework 1 Background An agent-based micro-simulation(ABMS; Agent Based Modeling / Simulation) has emerged as the future technology for analysis and prediction of economic and social phenomena. So many countries have involved in the development of the technology. FuturICT, the EU's FET (Future and Emerging Technologies)(1), is a flagship pilot project for a sustainable future society in terms of large-scale data analysis and forecasting techniques, and OECD countries have an effort to obtain a population simulate the system reflecting their social/economic/cultural characteristics. Especially, several countries, United States, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia, already have simulators capable of processing hundreds of thousands of agents. Due to the development of Distributed parallel computing technology and large- scale data obtained, Effective policy formulation and implementation based on data can be available and be expected to the0.5%productivity growthper year in the public administration sector. (2) This paper describes design considerations and implementation issues for constructing a Large-scale Agent-based Demographic Micro-simulation Framework. In traditional agent-based micro-simulator, numbers of agents of target model do not exceed several hundreds of thousands. In case of NetLogo, the simulation speed of a target model become slow down significantly when numbers of agents of the model exceed ten thousand. This paper describes design considerations and implementation issues for constructing a simulation framework that will be adopted to develop a large-scale agent-based demographic micro-simulation system for Korea.