An open synthetic population of Île-de-France

This repository contains the code to create an open data synthetic population of the Île-de-France region around in Paris and other regions in France.

Main reference

The main research reference for the synthetic population of Île-de-France is:

Hörl, S. and M. Balac (2021) Synthetic population and travel demand for Paris and Île-de-France based on open and publicly available data, Transportation Research Part C, 130, 103291.

What is this?

This repository contains the code to create an open data synthetic population of the Île-de-France region around in Paris and other regions in France. It takes as input several publicly available data sources to create a data set that closely represents the socio-demographic attributes of persons and households in the region, as well as their daily mobility patterns. Those mobility patterns consist of activities which are performed at certain locations (like work, education, shopping, ...) and which are connected by trips with a certain mode of transport. It is known when and where these activities happen.

Such a synthetic population is useful for many research and planning applications. Most notably, such a synthetic population serves as input to agent-based transport simulations, which simulate the daily mobility behaviour of people on a spatially and temporally detailed scale. Moreover, such data has been used to study the spreading of diseases, or the placement of services and facilities.

The synthetic population for Île-de-France can be generated from scratch by everybody who has basic knowledge in using Python. Detailed instructions on how to generate a synthetic population with this repository are available below.

Although the synthetic population is independent of the downstream application or simulation tool, we provide the means to create an input population for the agent- and activity-based transport simulation framework MATSim.

This pipeline has been adapted to many other regions and cities around the world and is under constant development. It is released under the GPL license, so feel free to make adaptations, contributions or forks as long as you keep your code open as well!

Documentation

This pipeline fulfils to purposes: First, to create synthetic populations of French regions in CSV and GLPK format including households, persons and their daily localized activities. Second, the pipeline makes use of infrastructure data to generate the inputs to agent-based transport simulations. These steps are described in the following documents:

• How to create a synthetic population of Île-de-France
• How to run a MATSim simulation of Île-de-France

Furthermore, we provide documentation on how to make use of the code to create popuations and run simulations of other places in France. While these are examples, the code can be adapted to any other scenarios as well:

• Toulouse and Occitanie region
• Lyon and neighboring departments
• Nantes and Loire Atlantique
• Corsica

Publications

• Hörl, S. and M. Balac (2021) Synthetic population and travel demand for Paris and Île-de-France based on open and publicly available data, Transportation Research Part C, 130, 103291.
• Hörl, S. and M. Balac (2021) Open synthetic travel demand for Paris and Île-de-France: Inputs and output data, Data in Brief, 107622.
• Hörl, S., M. Balac and K.W. Axhausen (2019) Dynamic demand estimation for an AMoD system in Paris, paper presented at the 30th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Paris, June 2019.
• Hörl, S. (2019) An agent-based model of Île-de-France: Overview and first results, presentation at Institut Paris Region, September 2019.

Versioning

The current version of the pipeline is v1.2.0. You can obtain it by cloning the v1.2.0 tag of this repository. Alternatively, you can also clone the develop branch to make use of the latest developments. The version number will be kept in the develop branch until a new version is officially released.

Note that whenever you create a population with this pipeline, the meta.json in the output will let you know the exact git commit with which the population was created.