Microsimulation models that forecast the activities and travel of urban populations first create a synthetic population and then simulate the behavior of the households and persons in that synthetic population. Typically, they create a base year synthetic population from census data, and then use aggregate demographic and land use forecasts to create a synthetic population for each forecast year. The synthesis procedure involves two main steps. First a demographic distribution of households is estimated for each transportation analysis zone or small census area (zone), and then a matching sample of households is drawn from a set of household records for which nearly complete census information is available (microdata sample).
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