News Release

SimCity for real

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Research Councils UK

Social policy makers and town planners will soon be able to play 'SimCity' for real using grid computing and e-Science techniques to test the consequences of their policies on a real, but anonymous, model of the UK population. Dr Mark Birkin and colleagues, who are developing the model at the University of Leeds, will be demonstrating its potential at the UK e-Science stand at SC06, the world's largest supercomputing conference in Florida, this week.

They are using data recorded at the 2001 census to build a model of the whole UK population, but with personal details omitted so no individual or household can be identified. Their project, Modelling and Simulation for e-Social Science is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council National Centre for e-Social Science. "We're building a core model which represents the whole of the UK at the level of (synthetic) individuals and households with many attributes and behaviours," says Dr Birkin.

Data about these attributes - such as car ownership, house prices and use of health, education, transport and leisure facilities - are held by different agencies in different locations and often in different formats. "Historically, people have assembled data on a single PC or workstation. E-Science provides exciting opportunities to access multiple databases from remote, virtual locations, making it possible to develop highly generic simulation models which are easy to update," says Dr Birkin.

The model can be projected into the future to explore the effect of different demographic trends and also to test the consequences of policy decisions. The SC06 demonstration will show how the model could help inform policy for a major UK city under a number of different scenarios. "We can profile populations area by area and forecast attributes such as health status, employment, and car ownership ten or twenty years ahead. In future, we'll be able to project the effects of policy change and help policymakers evaluate the impact of the decisions they take," says Dr Birkin.

The demonstration, e-Social Science in action: a prototype geo-simulation portal, can be seen at the UK e-Science Programme stand at SC06, aisle 2200, booth 2234

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Contacts

Dr Mark Birkin e-mail: M.H.Birkin@leeds.ac.uk

Notes for editors

  1. e-Science refers to the science that can be done when researchers have access to resources held on widely-dispersed computers as though they were on their own desktops. The resources can include many digital data collections, very large scale computing resources, scientific instruments and high performance visualisation.

  2. A grid allows these different resources to work together seamlessly across networks, enabling people to share them, often across traditional boundaries, and form virtual organizations. The vision is to facilitate collaborative working in multi-disciplinary teams by providing easy access to resources via web interfaces, and powerful tools to organise computing tasks. e-Science has the potential to smooth out inequalities in research investment by making resources available to those who could not afford their own.

  3. The UK e-Science Programme is a coordinated initiative involving all the Research Councils and the Department of Trade and Industry. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council manages the e Science Core Programme, which is developing generic technologies, on behalf of all the Research Councils and the research communities they support.

  4. The UK e-Science Programme as a whole is fostering the development of IT and grid technologies to enable new ways of doing faster, better or different research, with the aim of establishing a sustainable, national e-infrastructure for research and innovation which meets the aims of the government's Investment Framework for Science and Innovation 2004-2014. e-Science and the e-infrastructure are thus contributing to the economic success of the UK.

  5. Further information at www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience, the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) www.nesc.ac.uk and the individual research councils:

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