Population Synthesis for a City in a Developing Country

Abstract

Activity-based approach in transportation studies increased the demand for detailed disaggregate data. To overcome the tedious and costly data collection, synthesized data are widely used in activity based modeling practices in developed countries. In the case of developing economies, time, resource and monetary constraints hinder the development of new generation travel demand models. Population synthesis practices are the need of the hour in developing countries. Through this study, the authors proposed a method for population synthesis for a medium sized city, in a developing country. Details from 9901 households, collected through home-interview survey in 2011 formed the database for this work. The proposed synthesis procedure makes use of Monte Carlo process along with logit modeling technique to simulate population attributes using the survey data. The procedure is developed as a Visual Basic Application in spreadsheet platform. By adopting this method, various household level and person level attributes are simulated. Comparison of observed data from survey and simulated data showed consistent results and low differences. It is expected that this study will assist the planning authorities to better understand the city′s population characteristics.