Application of Socioeconomic Model System for Activity-Based Modeling: Experience from Southern California

This paper presents results from the application of a comprehensive socioeconomic and demographic model system in conjunction with a continuous-time, activity-based microsimulation model of travel demand developed for the Southern California Association of Governments. The socioeconomic model system includes two major components. The first is a synthetic population generator that is capable of synthesizing a representative population for the entire region while controlling for both household- and person-level marginal distributions. The second is an econometric microsimulator that models various socioeconomic and demographic attributes for each person in the synthetic population with a view to developing a rich set of input data for the activity-based microsimulation model system. The results show that the socioeconomic model system is capable of replicating known distributions of demographic attributes in the population and can be easily scaled for implementation in large regions such as the Southern California area, which includes a population of more than 18 million people in its model boundaries.