Methods and Techniques to Create Synthetic Firms as Input into a Microscopic Freight Simulator

Abstract

There is a necessity to discuss the way how to create a set of synthetic attributions as an input to a microscopic freight model. Up to present, there is increasingly the number of researches on microscopic models. Even though it is the very beginning stage of the disaggregate type travel behavior model; however, surprisingly, only very few researches are discussing on how to build up the synthetic firms properly. This paper therefore aiming at discussion about the available methods and techniques those researchers in this field has been done concurrently with the issues on data availability and to provide and discuss in details the technique used to create a synthetic firms fed to the application of a microscopic freight simulator in the study area of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. The iterative proportional fitting (IPF) has been found the most suitable technique for our purpose.