ciupava / uatk-spc

Synthetic Population Catalyst

Synthetic Population Catalyst

The Synthetic Population Catalyst (SPC) makes it easier for researchers to work with synthetic population data in England. It combines a variety of data sources and outputs a single file in protocol buffer format, describing the population in a given study area. The tool also provides methods to export the outcome in diferent formats often use for researchers like CSV or JSON.

The input of the SPC tool is a list of the Middle Layer Super Output Area (MSOAs) where you want to create a spatially enriched sythetic population to feed other dynamic models. SPC includes a script to assist you with the proper list of the MSOAs by defining a Local Authority District area in England. Get started to download SPC data or run the tool in different MSOAs.

Lineage

The history of this project is as follows:

1. The Dynamic Model for Epidemics (DyME), originally written in R, then later converted to Python and OpenCL was first written: https://github.com/Urban-Analytics/RAMP-UA
2. The "ecosystem of digital twins" branch heavily refactored the code to support running in different study areas and added a new seeding and commuting modelling: https://github.com/Urban-Analytics/RAMP-UA/tree/Ecotwins-withCommuting
3. This separate repository was created to port the initialisation logic to Rust, following the above branch.

There are many contributors to the project through these different stages; the version control history can be seen on Github in the other repositories.