CSIT

This paper documents a statewide campaign to introduce mistaken curriculum in the Technical and Further Education (TAFE) sector in the late 1990s / early 2000s that threatened to undermine the social and political content of the Community Development diploma. We document the demands put forward by students, the tactics used and the outcomes of the campaign.

A decade on from the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, we are at a point where computer simulations of community evacuations are starting to be used within the emergency services. While fire progression modelling is embedded in strategic and operational settings at all levels of government across Victoria, modelling of community response to such fires is only just starting to be evaluated in earnest. For community response models to become integral to bushfire planning and preparedness, the key question to be addressed is: when faced with a bushfire, what will a community really do? Typically this understanding has come from local experience and expertise within the community and services, however the trend is to move towards more informed data driven approaches. In this paper we report on the latest work within the emergency sector in this space. Particularly, we discuss the application of Strahan et al.’s self-evacuation archetypes to an agent-based mode...

We present work on creating a synthetic population from census data for Australia, applied to the greater Melbourne region. We use a sample-free approach to population synthesis that does not rely on a disaggregate sample from the original population. The inputs for our algorithm are joint marginal distributions from census of desired person-level and household-level attributes, and outputs are a set of comma-separated-value (.csv) files containing the full synthetic population of unique individuals in households; with age, gender, relationship status, household type, and size, matched to census data. Our algorithm is efficient in that it can create the synthetic population for Melbourne comprising 4.5 million persons in 1.8 million households within three minutes on a modern computer. Code for the algorithm is hosted on GitHub.

This work proposes a novel application independent heuristics specifying framework and a household structures construction process, for sample-free population synthesis. The framework decouples heuristics and the algorithm by defining a set of generic constructs to specify heuristics on relationships and household structures. The algorithm uses Iterative Proportional Fitting, Monte Carlo sampling and combinatorial optimisation to synthesise the population. Decoupled nature of the system allows it to be used in di erent applications relatively easily by changing the heuristics. We demonstrate that this is a robust technique capable of producing synthetic agent populations highly consistent to input data distributions using two case studies. Apart from contributing to synthetic population reconstruction, this work will form one of the building blocks for integrating independently developed models to build complex new agent based models.