The Patterns of Life Human Mobility Simulation

TL;DR

This paper presents the Patterns of Life simulation, a tool for generating realistic human mobility data in cities and regions worldwide, with scalable options for large-scale data generation and analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces a scalable, region-agnostic human mobility simulation that can generate large amounts of realistic trajectory data using open-source geographic data.

Findings

Simulation can generate up to 100,000 agents for years of data.

The simulation is scalable and region-independent using OpenStreetMap data.

Participants can learn to generate and analyze synthetic mobility data.

Abstract

We demonstrate the Patterns of Life Simulation to create realistic simulations of human mobility in a city. This simulation has recently been used to generate massive amounts of trajectory and check-in data. Our demonstration focuses on using the simulation twofold: (1) using the graphical user interface (GUI), and (2) running the simulation headless by disabling the GUI for faster data generation. We further demonstrate how the Patterns of Life simulation can be used to simulate any region on Earth by using publicly available data from OpenStreetMap. Finally, we also demonstrate recent improvements to the scalability of the simulation allows simulating up to 100,000 individual agents for years of simulation time. During our demonstration, as well as offline using our guides on GitHub, participants will learn: (1) The theories of human behavior driving the Patters of Life simulation, (2) how to simulate to generate massive amounts of synthetic yet realistic trajectory data, (3) running the simulation for a region of interest chosen by participants using OSM data, (4) learn the scalability of the simulation and understand the properties of generated data, and (5) manage thousands of parallel simulation instances running concurrently.