Domain applications

Business

In this application area we propose building a model that sits on top of the individual and household microsimulation model and simulates the effects of a number of critical personal financial service events and scenarios to examine their potential impact both at a national but also, importantly, at a local level. The events we propose exploring relate to the increased level of personal indebtedness in the UK . Latest Bank of England estimates suggest that personal indebtedness have reached ¡ê1 trillion, equivalent to annual GDP. Several key factors come in to play looking towards the future :

• The pensions timebomb: as individuals recognise that their pension is unlikely to fund their current lifestyle they will look to liquidate assets (mainly property) to top up the shortfall in pension payments
• Relating to this the increased use of Equity Release Products to generate annuity incomes
• The reduction of inter-generational transmission of wealth
• Potential deflation in house prices
• Potential rise in interest rates
• Increase in household formation (more smaller households)

We propose building a simulation model that would explore the interdependencies of these potential events over the next decade. We believe that the impacts of a fall in house prices/ increase in interest rates will have substantively different impacts in different regions/localities of the UK that the simulation model should be able to detect and predict.

Transport

Many regional development agencies have ambitious plans for expansion within their local economies. For example, the recently published business plan for the Northern Way anticipates substantial increases in the throughput of business and leisure trips through northern airports, together with a growth in the region's share of ship arrivals and container freight. At the same time, the plan aspires to reduce congestion in the inter-urban strategic road network to below the national average by 2010. This challenging objective will only be achievable through some combination of a reduction in intra-regional business and leisure trips (for example, in relation to increased home-working), a redistribution of trips towards uncongested routes, changing modes of transport (for example, increased rail traffic), or investments in the transport infrastructure, e.g. new roads or improved junctions. The articulation of scenarios relating to changing demographics and business activity, together with economic forecasts in line with the ambitions of the Northern Way, and specific ¡®what if' changes to the local infrastructure, would be an example of a suitable challenge for the MOSES simulation technology.

Health care

One of the fundamental problems in health care modelling and analysis is that services are provided and monitored by organisations which are vertically-oriented, but that use profiles for individuals are not constrained by the same boundaries. For example, care for the elderly is provided through a rich combination of primary and secondary health care together with social services, local voluntary organisations, and informal support within a family or neighbourhood. However it is extremely difficult to get a view of service use at the level of individual patients, even across the two major services of health and social care because of the disassociation of the provider organisations. This is important, not least because service provision and utilisation are inextricable linked: for example, if hospital beds are limited within a particular area, then more intensive use of social services is one likely outcome. Therefore one objective within this part of the project would be to explore the capabilities of Grid technology to integrate data from diverse sources, including health and social care, to provided a balanced picture of service use. Another interesting question is the way in which ¡®social networks' might support more formal regimes of health and social care. For example, can one demonstrate that communities with strong social networks are persistently less dependent on formal care? The representation of individual members of the population within this project provides an ideal platform for investigations of this type, in which links within a social network could be simulated in a similar way to behaviours or other activity patterns.