GENESIS Social Simulation

Abstract

GENESIS is a research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council through the National Centre for e-Social Science research node program. Details of GENESIS can be found on-line via the following URL: http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.turner/projects/GENESIS/ One strand of GENESIS work aims to develop simulation models that represent individual humans and their organisations and how they change their location and influence over time. This chapter describes the development of two types of model that operate at different temporal resolutions over different time scales: Traffic Models work with time steps of a second; and Demographic Models work with time steps of a day. Both are computationally demanding and the chapter describes not just the development of the models, but also the work done to scale up from village scale with a thousand individuals, to produce simulation results at city scale with a million individuals.