A Geographic Automata Model of Residential Mobility

This paper describes a model of residential mobility, built to simulate individual households, their perception and reaction to varying conditions across different scales of interaction, and their movements to occupy housing in a physical, social, and economic environment. The methodology underpinning the model is based on an automata core, leveraging the advantages it offers in terms of representing individual entities and their rule-based interactions. This methodology is extended, however, to incorporate geography-specific fu nctionality, with advantages for modeling human systems. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated through the development of a rich model of residential mobility, in which individual households interact with other households and real estate infrastructure, dynamically in space and time, to form synthetic communities and artificial property submarkets. Use of the model for what-if experimentation is demonstrated with synthetic economic and socio-demographic simulation scenarios.