  Emergence of smartphone and the participatory sensing (PS) paradigm have
paved the way for a new variant of pervasive computing. In PS, human user
performs sensing tasks and generates notifications, typically in lieu of
incentives. These notifications are real-time, large-volume, and multi-modal,
which are eventually fused by the PS platform to generate a summary. One major
limitation with PS is the sparsity of notifications owing to lack of active
participation, thus inhibiting large scale real-life experiments for the
research community. On the flip side, research community always needs ground
truth to validate the efficacy of the proposed models and algorithms. Most of
the PS applications involve human mobility and report generation following
sensing of any event of interest in the adjacent environment. This work is an
attempt to study and empirically model human participation behavior and event
occurrence distributions through development of a location-sensitive data
simulation framework, called PS-Sim. From extensive experiments it has been
observed that the synthetic data generated by PS-Sim replicates real
participation and event occurrence behaviors in PS applications, which may be
considered for validation purpose in absence of the groundtruth. As a
proof-of-concept, we have used real-life dataset from a vehicular traffic
management application to train the models in PS-Sim and cross-validated the
simulated data with other parts of the same dataset.
