Modelling UK domestic energy and carbon emissions: an agent-based approach

As the debate on policy responses to climate change gathers pace, there has been an increasing focus on tools to model national scale energy use and emission characteristics of UK dwellings. This paper reviews some existing models and highlights limitations of their common underlying methodologies. We argue that a radically different, integrated, approach is required to tackle these challenges and ensure that the modelling remain robust and able to meet future demands. We suggest that Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is a suitable candidate modelling paradigm to achieve an integrated modelling framework. We also present DECarb-ABM (an ABM based implementation of an existing model, DECarb) with many of the desired properties of such an integrated framework. The new model is validated against both the existing model and historical data.

► Survey of existing approaches to modelling UK housing stock and limitations. ► Agent-based modelling (ABM) applied to UK housing stock. ► Docking against existing equation-based model (EBM). ► Exploration of flexibility offered by ABM. ► Evaluation of advantages of ABM over EBM.