A method based on iterative proportional fitting (IPF) is developed for generating synthetic populations for the application of Albatross, a rulebased and activity-based model of travel demand. The Dutch Travel Survey (OVG) provides sample data for populations to be synthesized by zone. A method is proposed to generate synthetic households on the basis of data on distributions of individuals. This method uses the concept of relation matrices to convert distributions of individuals to distributions of households in a preprocessing step. Furthermore, a method is proposed to address differences in populations that relate to locational characteristics.