Towards an automated, open, and reproducible synthetic population of Switzerland

Abstract

Good mobility simulations require a synthetic population to produce adequate representations of the real mobility behaviour in a country. In the case of Switzerland, current best practices involve the hand-crafting of a synthetic population based on general public data and restricted household travel survey (in Switzerland called micro-censuses) information. The restricted information is also causing many synthetic population models to be generated in closed-source making comparisons of different synthetic populations difficult. Furthermore, the manual sourcing of data quickly becomes outdated and requires repeated manual updating to stay up-to-date which is rarely performed. Recent advances around MATSim have made the simulation platform more accessible through the eqasim pipeline that prepares a synthetic population and its travel demand and loads it into MATSim for direct use. However, the automated acquisition of the baseline data for the synthetic population is still an open issue. In this paper, we introduce an automated pipeline from opendata.swiss and proxies for the restricted micro-census. While we cannot provide full transparency without impinging on privacy for the micro-census, we can make all other transformations transparent and rely on proxies for the micro-census. Here, we present an updated eqasim simulation of Switzerland based on the previously published work comparing the existing synthetic population with our automatically updated synthetic population.