Specification of MiniDemographicABM.jl: A simplified agent-based demographic model of the UK

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified demographic agent-based model of the UK using Julia, designed to explore demographic dynamics and demonstrate the capabilities of the Agents.jl package for large-scale socio-economic simulations.

Contribution

It presents a new simplified demographic ABM for the UK, implemented in Julia, serving as a flexible base for various socio-economic and demographic studies.

Findings

Model successfully simulates aging, births, deaths, marriages, and divorces.

Flexible simulation step sizes enable detailed temporal analysis.

Provides a foundation for future large-scale demographic modeling.

Abstract

This documentation specifies a simplified non-calibrated demographic agent-based model of the UK, a largely simplified version of the Lone Parent Model presented in [Gostolil and Silverman 2020]. In the presented model, individuals of an initial population are subject to ageing, deaths, births, divorces and marriages throughout a simplified map of towns of the UK. The specification employs the formal terminology presented in [Elsheikh 2023a]. The main purpose of the model is to explore and exploit capabilities of the state-of-the-art Agents.jl Julia package [Datseris2022] in the context of demographic modeling applications. Implementation is provided via the Julia package MiniDemographicABM.jl [Elsheikh 2023b]. A specific simulation is progressed with a user-defined simulation fixed step size on a hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis or even an arbitrary user-defined clock rate. The model can serve for comparative studies if implemented in other agent-based modelling frameworks and programming languages. Moreover, the model serves as a base implementation to be adjusted to realistic large-scale socio-economics, pandemics or immigration studies mainly within a demographic context.