TPS member, Susanna Bass, a Traffic Control Engineer with TfL, has been awarded the 2012 Voorhees-Large Prize for her dissertation Development and Evaluation of Synthetic Populations for London submitted for her transport Masters at Imperial College London and UCL. The Voorhees-Large Prize, which is worth £500, is awarded by the Brian Large Bursary Fund for the best dissertation submitted by a UK resident studying for a Transport Masters.

In her dissertation Susanna sought to explore the concept of synthetic demand and how it could be used to improve the quality of travel demand modelling for London. She used 1991 Census and London Area Transport Survey data as inputs to population synthesis software PopGen to create a set of synthetic populations for London, using different geographical levels and control variables. To understand the suitability of these synthetic populations, she used a number of analysis techniques, comparing the synthesised with the Office of National Statistics’ Samples of Anonymised Records.

The Brian Large Bursary Fund is a registered charity, formed by Brian Large’s family, friends and colleagues to keep his memory alive, following his death in 1989.