Impact of Population Relocation to City Commerce: Micro-Level Estimation with Validated Agent-Based Model

To reduce overpopulation around Seoul, Korea, the government implemented a relocation policy of public officers by moving the government complex. This implies that there will be a negative impact on the suburban area that originally hosted the complex, but we do not know the magnitude of the impact. Therefore, this paper presents a micro-level estimation of the impact on the city commerce with an agent-based model. This model is calibrated by the micro-level population census data, the time-use data, and the geographic data. Agent behavior is formally specified to illustrate the daily activities of diverse population types, and particularly the model observes how many agents pass by commercial buildings of interest. With the described model, we performed a virtual experiment that examines the strengths of factors in negatively influencing the city commerce. After the experiment, we statistically validated the model with the survey data from the real world, which resulted in relatively high correlation between the real world and the simulations.