Employment Transition Model (ETM)

Objective

The Employment Transition Model predicts new jobs being created within or moved to the region by businesses, or the loss of jobs from businesses in the region - either through downsizing, closure of a business, or relocation out of the region.

Algorithm

The model compares the total number of jobs by sector in the jobs table at the beginning of a simulation year, to the total number of jobs by sector specified by the user in the annual employment control totals for that year. If the control total value is higher, the model adds the necessary number of jobs to the jobs table by sampling existing jobs of the same sector and duplicating them. If the control totals indicate a declining job count for a sector then the appropriate number of jobs in the data are selected at random and removed. The role of this model is to keep the jobs data in the simulation synchronized with aggregate expectations of employment in the region. In most current applications, control totals are separately specified for each sector and split by a proportion that is assumed to be home-based employment vs non-home-based employment. These two are handled by different model groups in the employment location choice model.

Configuration

OPUS path to model code

urbansim.models.transition_model

Model Parameters

The configuration of the ETM in the zone model system is summarized in the following table:

Element	Setting
Agent	Business (implicit when jobs are used instead of businesses
Dataset	Jobs
Model Structure	Rule Based

Data

The following tables are used in the Employment Transition Model in the zone version of UrbanSim.

Table Name	Brief Description
annual_employment_control_totals	Annual aggregate control totals for employment by sector
jobs	jobs

-- PaulWaddell - 07 Dec 2009