Development of a Fleet Allocator Model for Calgary,Canada

The Calgary commercial vehicle model is an attempt to model all commercial vehicle movements in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, as part of a larger model system that includes a personal travel model. One type of commercial vehicle initially modeled in a simple, gravity-based fashion because of limited data is the fleet allocator. Fleet allocators are commercial vehicles that make many stops in a coordinated pattern. These include services such as garbage pickup, newspaper and mail delivery, and couriers. From an existing linear regression trip generation model and a gravity-based distribution model, a more complex tour-based model system consistent with the approach for the remainder of the commercial vehicles was adopted. With available aggregate fleet allocator information provided with the cooperation of the City of Edmonton, Canada, along with the parameters estimated for other types of commercial vehicles in the existing tour-based Calgary commercial vehicle model, a full tour-based fleet allocator model was developed and calibrated to match the available observed data. The process used was a successful demonstration of using an existing model to cover a different set of movements by calibrating the model parameters using the additional available data.