Liam2: a new open source development tool for discrete-time dynamic microsimulation models

Abstract

Most existing microsimulation models have been developed by separate (teams of) researchers. The drawback of each team working on its own is that they have to put a lot of time and effort in the customary development of fairly general simulation tools. Hence, economies of scale cannot be exploited, which makes microsimulation models even more expensive than strictly necessary. The objective of this paper is to present LIAM2, a free and open source modelling framework designed for the development of discrete-time dynamic models. It is meant to make microsimulation models much easier to develop. This paper makes a comparison with other simulation frameworks, presents a minimal LIAM2 model and discusses its performance in terms of data capacity and simulation speed.