Testing Uncertainty in an Integrated Land Use-TransportationMicrosimulation Model of Demographic Updating

In microsimulation models, the behaviours of agents as intelligent objects aremodeled through various behavioral modeling techniques, which give rise touncertainties in the modeling workflow and predicted outputs. ILUTE (IntegratedLand Use Transportation Environment model) is an agent-object-basedmicrosimulation model system, in which many agents (persons, families,households, firms, etc.) intelligently and/or randomly act and interact in acomplex ways. A 150,000 (150K) synthetic base year (1986) household sampleof the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) population is used as thestarting point for undertaking twenty-years of historical simulations (1986-2006).In order to analyze the uncertainty associated with stochastic behaviours in theILUTE model system, a 1000 independent runs using different initial randomnumber seeds are generated and tested. In this paper, the behaviour of thedemographic updating module were tested by examining the variability of itsoutputs including births, deaths, families, and households across simulation runs.The test results show that all the simulated outputs’ distributions are generallynormally, or very close to normally, distributed. In general, ILUTE can simulatedemographic updating process with considerable reliability and confidence.

Keywords:

ILUTE , Microsimulation , Stochastic Behaviour , Urban System , IntegratedModels , Land Use , Transportation