Frick, M. and Axhausen, K.W. (2004) Generating Synthetic Populations using IPF and Monte Carlo Techniques. 4th Swiss Transport Research Conference, Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland.

Abstract

The generation of synthetic populations represents a substantial contribution to the acquisition of useful data for large scale agent based microsimulations in the field of transport planning.

Basically, the observed data are available from various sources, i.e. censuses (microcensus) in which the data is available in terms of simple summary tables of demographics, such as the number of persons per household for census-block-group-sized areas. Nevertheless, there is a need of more disaggregated personal data, and thus another type of data source is considered. The Public Use Sample (PUS), often used in transportation studies, is a 5% representative sample of complete census records, including bad records, for each individual, excluding addresses and unique identifiers.

The problem is, to generate a large number of individual agents (~1Mio.) with appropriate characteristic values of the demographic variables for each agent, interacting in the microsimulation. The main techniques used to generate the agents are IPF and simple MC.

In this paper we present further results of our effort to disaggregate the available census data. First, we present agents with age and sex as the sociodemographic characteristics for all municipalities in Switzerland using data from census 2000 and microcensus 2000. Second, we added more sociodemographic variables like driver licence ownership, car availability, employment, accessibility of halbtax and GA periodic tickets to obtain more realistic agents for all of  Switzerland. Third we made some effort to disaggregate the data to a hectare based level for employment, age, and sex of the agents. The current state of this work will be presented.

ivt_ab225.pdf 4 MB