Microsimulating the spatial distribution of commercial vehicles by the location of their owned establishments

This paper presents a process for developing synthetic population to estimate the number of commercial vehicle owned at the business establishment level. The analysis also provides the basis to justify the use of zonal data of all the registered commercial vehicles within the study area from sources like Polk to study the spatial prevalence (or assignment) of such vehicles in a given census tract. The main concern is that some CVs that are registered to the establishment in the census tract as given in the Polk data might not be physically located or operating from that location. The hypothesis is that synthesized aggregates are a true representation of the vehicles registered and operated from the same zone. Hence achieving comparable results would provide a basis to use the of Polk data in future research. Using combinatorial optimization techniques, a synthetic population of establishments that engage in commercial activities for the Windsor CMA is created. Then the total number of vehicles owned was assigned to each establishment of the population by linking each establishment directly to an establishment of the microsample attained from the survey responses. Using the Polk data as a validation source, comparisons against the synthesized total number of vehicles were made. The results of comparison show a relatively good fit with a correlation of 0.88 between the synthesized and the validation data. This indicate that the Polk data can be used to examine the spatial distribution of commercial vehicles especially that it has more details on the year, make and model of the registered vehicles. Future research will focus on using the Polk data to develop new models of commercial vehicle ownership location to study the spatial prevalence of the various types of commercial vehicles, as derived from the Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) classes, in a given zone.