Title
Virtual city: An individual-based digital environment for human mobility and interactive behavior
Abstract
Increasing computing capability and high-resolution digital tracing of human behavior make large-scale computational models for individual-based realistic simulation available. Reconstructing a virtual computational environment is crucial for designing and implementing individual interactions in an artificial society as human beings behave in the real world. In this paper, we propose a methodology to recreate a virtual city by utilizing statistical data and geographic information. The synthetic population and physical environment are baseline components of the virtual city. Individual-based modeling is used to specify individuals' demographic characteristics, and each individual is endowed with heterogeneous social attributes. Various physical environments are generated with geographic locations and mapped with individuals to support daily mobility, migration, and interaction. A series of algorithms are proposed to bridge the gap between macroscopic data and microscopic models, and guarantee equivalence between them. Based on the methodology, we reconstructed a virtual city of Beijing, and presented the statistical analysis of population structure, spatial distribution of physical environments, human travel characteristics, and spatial topologies of social networks. Our synthetic population can represent individual actors in the form of households and household members, and the synthetic population is statistically equivalent to a real population. The proposed methodology is efficient to recreate a synthetic virtual city and can serve as a base for computational experiments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1177/0037549714531061
Simulation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
individual-based modeling,virtual city,multilayer social networks,communication behavior,synthetic population
Journal
90
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
0037-5497
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
16
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yuanzheng Ge1213.53
Rongqing Meng2122.38
ZhiDong Cao36715.12
Xiaogang Qiu414920.35
Kedi Huang57911.95