Testing Transport Routes and Burglary

I have recently run some tests with transport routes in my burglary simulation and have some nice results. The image shows what happens when a simulated burglar has to walk around (left) and when they're given a access to public transport (right). These are purely hypothetical simulations, but it shows some of the potential of the model.
















When the agent has to walk between their friend's house, drug dealer and their home, they are able to explore more of the city on the way. This gives them a much greater knowledge of the area when they need to commit a burglary.

When they use public transport to travel, on the other hand, they do not explore the surrounding area as they would do if they were walking. Therefore the burglaries are much more clustered around their anchor points (home address, friend's house and drug dealer).

Although this is a simple result I'm hoping that this type of experiment will be very useful when trying to predict real burglary rates.

New paper: Prototype Burglary Simulations For Crime Reduction and Forecasting

I have recently had a paper jointly authored with Patricia L. Brantingham, published in the journal Crime Patterns and Analysis, available online.

The journal introduces prototype version of the burglary simulation model and also illustrates some preliminary burglary predictions in an area of Leeds, UK. As the image below demonstrates, the early results are promising; the model is able to relatively accurately recreate crime patterns found in the real data.