Running a simulation

To calculate Tax and Benefit System variables on people’s situations, you need to create and run a new Simulation.

OpenFisca will work the same if there is one person, seven, or seven million in the modelled situation.

Technically speaking, OpenFisca uses vector computing via the NumPy package for performance reasons.

Nevertheless, you won’t have the same experience defining those various situation sizes and linking them to your simulation. So, multiple options could be used to describe this information:

  • either test cases: you simulate the legislation for a small number of persons,

  • or bulk data: you provide a population (survey with aggregated data, CSV files with bulk data, etc.) on which you want to apply the legislation.

Then, when you have a defined situation and need to replicate an input in a range of values (e.g. a salary in [0, 100 000]), you can define an axis as described in the axes section.

Finally, you might want to understand how your simulation result was calculated. To do so, you can use the trace feature described in this section.