Generating French virtual commuting network at municipality level

TL;DR

This paper adapts a stochastic model to generate virtual commuting networks at the municipality level in French rural regions, addressing data limitations and regional dependencies to better understand local mobility dynamics.

Contribution

It extends and calibrates a stochastic commuting network model for French municipalities, incorporating regional dependencies and testing deterrence functions.

Findings

The model can generate reliable regional commuting networks.

A constant parameter effectively links French municipalities.

Two deterrence functions are compared with insights on their performance.

Abstract

We aim to generate virtual commuting networks in the French rural regions in order to study the dynamics of their municipalities. Since we have to model small commuting flows between municipalities with a few hundreds or thousands inhabitants, we opt for a stochastic model presented by Gargiulo et al. 2012. It reproduces the various possible complete networks using an iterative process, stochastically choosing a workplace in the region for each commuter living in the municipality of a region. The choice is made considering the job offers in each municipality of the region and the distance to all the possible destinations. This paper presents how to adapt and implement this model to generate French regions commuting networks between municipalities. We address three different questions: How to generate a reliable virtual commuting network for a region highly dependant of other regions for the satisfaction of its resident's demand for employment? What about a convenient deterrence function? How to calibrate the model when detailed data is not available? We answer proposing an extended job search geographical base for commuters living in the municipalities, we compare two different deterrence functions and we show that the parameter is a constant for network linking French municipalities.