Linked lives: The utility of an agent-based approach to modeling partnership and household formation in the context of social care

Noble, Jason, Eric Silverman, Jakub Bijak, Stuart Rossiter, Maria Evandrou, Seth Bullock, Athina Vlachantoni, and Jane Falkingham. “Linked lives: the utility of an agent-based approach to modeling partnership and household formation in the context of social care.” In Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) , pp. 1-12. IEEE, 2012.
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The UK’s population is aging, which presents a challenge as older people are the primary users of health and social care services. We present an agent-based model of the basic demographic processes that impinge on the supply of, and demand for, social care: namely mortality, fertility, health-status transitions, internal migration, and the formation and dissolution of partnerships and households. Agent-based modeling is used to capture the idea of “linked lives” and thus to represent hypotheses that are impossible to express in alternative formalisms. Simulation runs suggest that the per-taxpayer cost of state-funded social care could double over the next forty years. A key benefit of the approach is that we can treat the average cost of state-funded care as an outcome variable, and examine the projected effect of different sets of assumptions about the relevant social processes.

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