A simple and flexible activity-based simulation for Belgium

                     Johan Barthélemy and Philippe Toint
          naXys Technical Report naXys-10-2013      29 October 2013


Abstract.
The VirtualBelgium project aims at developing understanding of the evolution
of the Belgian population using agent-based simulations and considering 
various aspects of this evolution such as demographics, residential choices,
activity patterns, mobility, etc. This simulation is based on a validated
synthetic population consisting of approximately 10,000,000 individuals and
4,350,000 households localized in the 589 municipalities of Belgium.

The work presented in this paper focuses only on the mobility behaviour,
simulated using an activity-based approach in which the travel demand is
derived from the activities performed by the individuals. The proposed model
is distribution based and requires only minimal information, but is designed
for easily taking advantage of any additional network-related data available.

The proposed activity-based has been applied on the Belgian synthetic
population. The quality of the agent behaviour is discussed using statistical
criteria extracted from the literature and it is shown that VirtualBelgium
produces satisfactory results.