International research award for Stephan Onggo
Published 21 December 2009
Stephan Onggo, of the Department of Management Science, has been awarded £10,300 from the Royal Society to undertake a study with collaborators from Vicerectorat de Politica Universitaria in Barcelona on ‘Scalable simulators for high-fidelity models for policy analysis’.
Simulation at the micro (individual) level has become an increasingly popular method for population projection and allows specification of complex behavioural and cognitive rules at an individual level. Through aggregation, output at the macro level can be derived. Increasingly, the output of micro-level simulation models is used as an input to policy models.
For this project, Stephan and colleagues are developing a prototype of a micro-level demographic simulation that can be run on parallel computers. The long term aim of the research is to provide a software tool to support the development and the execution of micro-level simulation models for policy analysis that is built on top of a demographic model. The tool will be easy to use by non-computer experts and will have the ability to harness available computer power efficiently.
