  We propose to use agent-based simulation models for the development of
statistical methods in Official Statistics, especially in relation with the new
digital data sources. We present a mobile network data simulator which is
managed through the simutils R package which provides geospatial
representations of the simulated data. While the synthetic data are produced by
an external tool, our simutils package allows an R user to parameterize and run
this external simulation tool, to build geospatial data structures from the
simulation output or to compute several aggregates. The geospatial data
structures were designed with the purpose of using them in a visualization
package too. Useful simulation models require the incorporation of real
metadata from mobile telecommunication networks driving us to the inclusion of
functionalities allowing the user to specify and validate them. All metadata
are specified using XML file whose structure are defined in corresponding XSD
files. Our R package includes example data sets and we show here how validate
the metadata, how to run a simulation and how build the geospatial data
structures and how to compute different aggregates.
