Demo: e-Social Science in action: a prototype geo-simulation portal

We will present a demonstration of a prototype geo-simulation portal. The portal is populated by a synthetic representation of the entire UK population, which is constructed at the level of distinct households and their individual component members. The characteristics of these households include a wide range of social and demographic attributes (such as age, marital status, occupation, educational attainment and about 30 other attributes), as well as synthetic activity patterns involving journeys to work and consumption of services ranging from education and healthcare to retailing and leisure activities. The individuals are also connected to one another through a synthetic network of local contacts. The simulation has both a baseline and a projection component. In the baseline, the population is recreated for a fixed period of time (corresponding with the UK census of 2001). In the scenario, the population is projected into the future at 5 year intervals.

The purpose of the simulation is to support strategic decision-making through a variety of policy-relevant scenarios. These scenarios relate both to the present (impact analysis, or ‘what if?’ modelling) and to the future (forecasting, or scenario analysis). In the prototype version of the simulation, we will consider a variety of scenarios which include the evolutionary demographics of an increasingly elderly population, alternative patterns of service provision through health and social care networks, changing morbidity for specific disease conditions.

This work is supported through project Moses (Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science) at the University of Leeds. Moses is a research node of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) with its hub at the University of Manchester. Moses is registered as a user of the National Grid Service, and we are collaborating with the University of Manchester (Pascal Ekin) on the GEMS¹ project; with the University of Edinburgh ( Chris Higgins) on the OGC Collision proposal; with Daresbury, University of Aberdeen, UCL and others on the UK e-Social Science infrastructure project. We have international collaborations involving the use of SRB² (San Diego Supercomputer Centre) and Crown – a joint research network with the Chinese grid community. The demonstrator has substantial visual appeal through an attractive GIS³ interface.

¹ Grid-Enabling Mimas Services

² Storage Resource Broker

³ GIS = Geographical Information System i.e. virtual mapping and interrogation capability.