A Markovian Flow Model

First of a series of reports describing a model of social mobility to provide information concerning patterns of movement, projections of the existing population into the future, and the impact produced by changes in the rate of movement. The model and computing procedures permit personnel managers to create an information system that describes the social and geographic mobility that military personnel continually undergo. Derived from mathematical concepts of Markovian processes, the model is presented as a series of FORTRAN subroutines capable of being used on a variety of contemporary computers. The model's principal attribute is its capacity to create future expected values given the starting distributions and a matrix of transition probabilities. Other options, ranging from the computation of the transition matrix to the comparison of projections under different conditions, are peripheral subroutines of the model, but give it the flexibility required for complete analysis of the movement of members of a population. (See also R-534, R-535.)