Research completed!

I have recently completed my burglary simulation PhD and a copy of the thesis will be made available on my University of Leeds home page. There are lots of papers forthcoming which discuss the results and the implications for crime simulation and environmental criminology, I'll post them as they work their way through the reviewing process. The model itself is also going to be made available, and I'm hoping to make it more usable for other researchers and policy makers over the next few months.

In the thesis, I ran a scenario in Leeds, UK, that tried to predict the effects of a major urban development scheme on individual household burglary risk. The model simulated the daily movements "potential burglars" and the resulting crime patterns before and after the regeneration. Interestingly, the model predicted that a few houses in particular will face a disproportionately high risk as a result of the regeneration, due to the changing behaviour of the simulated burglars. The image below shows which houses might receive more (red) and fewer (green) burglaries once the urban development has finished. I am going to speak to policy-makers in Leeds about this in the coming weeks to see what they think about the results and whether or not some policy changes might come out of the research.




















And finally a quick plug to finish this post. I recently had a paper published in the journal "Computers, Environment and Urban Systems" which illustrates a working example of the prototype burglary simulation, based on an abstract city and the research was also mentioned in an article in The Guardian newspaper.

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.

Scientific Computing World Article

Felix Grant has just published an interesting article in Scientific Computing World about how statistical approaches have been applied to the social sciences (crime in particular) and how agent-based modelling is being used. He also does a short case-study on my PhD research.

If you're interested you can read the article on the scientific computing world website or on Felix's blog.

Crime Mapping Conference Presentation

I recently presented a paper entitled "Using Simulation to Predict Prospective Burglary Rates in Leeds and Vancouver" at the 7th National Crime Mapping Conference, 7th-8th May 2009 in Manchester, UK. The conference was a great success as usual, bringing together people from all areas of the police, community safety and academia.

The presentation briefly outlined the burglary simulation and showed some initial results. Here is the abstract and slides.

The following image is an extract of the burglary hotspots which were produced by the Vancouver Sky Train scenario. In this scenario I was experimenting with adding and removing Sky Train lines (a high-speed urban rail link) from Vancouver, Canada. When the simulation has been configured correctly we would like to predict what effect the new Canada Line (which is being build to support the 2010 winder Olympics) willl have on burglary rates in the city.

Simulation case studies in Vancouver

In January - February this year I was able to visit the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, to work with expert criminologists Pat and Paul Brantingham. I was able to run a prototype of my simulation on Vancouver to see how crime rates might change if a new rapid-transit rail line was built.

There is a short presentation which has lots of information about how I used the Vancouver data to configure the model and the results of the case studies themselves. As an example, the following figure illustrates how space syntax analysis can be used to estimate how busy a road might be and therefore how easy it would be for a burglar agent to gain access to a property without being seen by passers-by.

Simulating Burglary - Working Paper

I have just finished a working paper entitled "Simulating Burglary with an Agent-Based Model", available here. It reports some results of my initial burglary prototype. This model uses relatively simple burglar agents and a grid-based virtual environment but is a good introduction to the more complex model that I'm developing for my PhD.

The following video shows an early prototype in action. The burglar agents are yellow and other people (home owners) are blue. Initially some of the burglars go to work in the green area, but often employment doesn't provide them with enough money and they choose to burgle instead. This is a vast simplification of real behaviour and will be improved in later developments, but works well as a proof-of-concept prototype.