Investigation of Alternative Methods for Modeling Joint Activity Participation
Authored by Gaurav Vyas, Peter Vovsha, Rajesh Paleti, Danny Givon, Yehoshua Birotker
Date Published: 2015
DOI: 10.3141/2493-03
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Abstract
This study represents a research effort to capture explicitly the
intra-household interactions involved in the decision to participate in
a joint activity. Joint activity participation is a lesser-explored step
in activity based travel demand modeling, since enlisting all possible
subsets of household members in a large household results in many
alternatives. For example, the number of possible subsets of members out
of 10 persons is 2(10) = 1,024. After the exclusion of one empty subset
and 10 subsets with a single member, 1,013 distinct subsets should be
considered with two or more members for joint activity participation.
Even more important, a joint choice model formulation is behaviorally
unappealing and would require the formulation of a complicated utility
function for each possible subset. Additionally, different subsets would
have a highly different degree of similarity that would require a
sophisticated error structure. This paper analyzes three methods to
model joint activity participation that are relatively easy to estimate
and implement for households of any size. In all three methods, the
travel party is constructed on the basis of the individual and pairwise
propensities of the household members to be engaged in a joint activity.
These propensities are statistically estimated on survey data in the
form of relatively simple binary choice models. The travel party emerges
in the process of microsimulation as a result of the reconciliation of
the decisions of different household members. This approach is an
example of the use of the agent-based modeling paradigm to frame an
intrahousehold decision-making mechanism in addition to econometric
models.
Tags
Travel
Household members
Generation model