By Ms. Morgane Dumont

The forecasting of the population’s health needs is a big challenge in the current society, since the proportion of elderlies within the population is continually increasing. To allow each older person to live in a good health, health services need to be adapted. The project Virtual Belgium in Health (VBIH) aims to develop a platform based on a spatial micro-simulation that will approximate the health needs of elderlies in Belgium for 2030. To reach this goal, a synthetic static population of individuals grouped into households has already been constructed for 2011. The current concern is to model the dynamical processes that govern the population as real as possibility. The evolution frame plays on households and individuals year by year. The considered dynamics are divorces, marriages, births, deaths, getting a new diploma, activity status modification and relocation.

Drawing particularly on the knowledge of experts Dr Johan Barthélemy and Dr Nam Huynh, the collaboration with SMART Infrastructure Facility helped me to model and code some of these processes. At SMART, we created a discrete choice modelling and a neural network fitting the past choices of divorces. These techniques enable us to apply the same scheme to future years and approximate future divorces.

The order in which we consider the dynamical process is always an important topic in these kinds of studies. For this reason, we began an analysis of this theme using the scripts coded in the study ‘Simulating transport and land use interdependencies for strategic urban planning-an agent based modelling approach’ (Huynh et al. 2016). The first results show that the places of the death and aging processes in the evolution influence the total number of individuals at the end of the simulation. However, after 5 years, the difference between the configurations that reach the smallest and the highest number of individuals represents only 0.6% of the initial number of people. This work is in progress and will be continued in the coming months.

References

Huynh, N, Perez, P, Berryman, M & Barthélemy, J 2015, ‘Simulatng transport and land use interdependencies for strategic urban planning- an agent based modelling approach’, Systems, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 177-210.