Modified SA-based household reconstruction from statistics for agent-based social simulations

In this paper, we modify a household reconstruction method using simulated annealing (SA) for micro-simulations (MS) or agent-based simulations (ABS). MS and ABS are recently employed for social simulations. For enabling MS or ABS, each household composition such as ages, occupations, or other properties of each member of a household should be prepared before simulations. However real household compositions are not available to researchers due to privacy or security reasons. Therefore, we need to reconstruct household compositions from available statistics for MS or ABS. However, it should be noted that the reconstructed population is just an artificial population that is suitable to the employed statistics. That means, the generated population cannot always be a real population that gives the statistics. We modify the SA-based household reconstruction method in three points: a generation procedure of initial solution, a transition procedure in SA, and an evaluation procedure using more statistics. Through simulation results, we show how errors between the artificial population and real statistics are reduced by the proposed modifications.