In recent years, evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) has been called for to accommodate diverse stakeholders when local governments formulate new policies. Social simulation allows virtual observation of changes in social conditions resulting from various alternatives in policy-making. However, there has not been a generic social simulation for designing subsidy payment policies that can be used in various situations. The Evolutionary Computation Competition 2021 (EC Comp 2021), an optimization competition that has been held since 2017 and intends to promote interaction between industry and academia, asked participants to design subsidy payment policies with social simulation. EC Comp 2021 newly formulates a generic social simulation framework for designing subsidy payment policies. This social simulation estimates the effects of subsidy payment policies in response to changes in household economic conditions based on economic shock scenarios using statistically valid data on the residents in a city. This paper gives a detailed explanation of the subsidy payment design problem with the social simulation in EC Comp2021. This paper explains the participants’ optimization methods and their results, accompanied by a brief analysis of their results, and discusses the characteristics of the optimization problem.
