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30 Development of Mid- Ohio Regional Planning Commission Tour- Based Model Rebekah S. Anderson, Mid- Ohio Regional Planning Commission In 2002, the Mid- Ohio Regional Planning Commission(MORPC) contracted with PB Consult to develop a newregional travel forecasting model. The new model is an activity and tour- based model applied with microsimula- tion. The development of the model was based on the 1999 Household Interview Survey, which was supplemented by the 1993 Central Ohio Transportation Authority On- Board Survey and an external cordon survey conducted in 1995. The new model system was completed in 2004. The MORPC model incorporates most of the positive features of the other activity- and tour- based models as well as the growing body of research on activity- based modeling and microsimulation. In particular, the struc- ture and application experience of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority model and New York Metropolitan Transportation Council model had been carefully studied before the decisions about the MORPC structure was made. When compared with its predeces- sors, the MORPC structure represents two significant steps toward a better and more realistic description of travel behavior: ⢠Explicit modeling of intrahousehold interactions and joint travel that is of crucial importance for realistic modeling of the individual decisions made in the house- hold framework and in particular for choice of the high- occupancy vehicle as travel mode. The original concept of a full individual daily pattern that constituted a core of the previously proposed activity- based model systems has been extended in the MORPC system to incorporate various intrahousehold impacts of different household members on each other, joint participation in activities and travel, and intrahousehold allocation mechanisms for maintenance activities. ⢠Enhanced temporal resolution of 1 h, with explicit tracking of available time windows for generation and scheduling of tours instead of the four or five broad time- of- day (TOD) periods applied in most of the conventional and activity- based models previously developed. The time- of- day choice model adopted for MORPC is essentially a continuous duration model transformed into a discrete choice form. The enhanced temporal resolution opens a way to control explicitly the person- time windows left after scheduling of each tour and to use the residual time window as an important explanatory variable for genera- tion and scheduling of the subsequent tours. At the first step, the model system generates a synthe- sized list of all households and population for the entire area, consistent with the household and workforce vari- ables in the zonal data. The output from this population synthesis model is a file with a record for every person in the area (currently about 1.5 million), containing vari- ous attributes for each synthesized person. Attributes include the household to which the person belongs; whether it is a high-, medium-, or low- income house- hold; and the type of worker or person (e.g., part- time worker, school child, university student, etc). To gain more information about a household and household composition, a record is sampled from the Public Use Microdata Sample. Then the core set of choice models is applied for each household and person (Figure 1). It includes eight main linked- choice models. The numbering of Models 1