Modelling intra-household interactions in household’s activity-travel scheduling behaviour

Abstract

Activity-travel scheduling models can be used to investigate individuals’ activity and travel decisions such as activity type, activity duration, and departure time. Considerable evidence suggests that intra-household behavioural interactions exist in household activity-travel scheduling behaviour, which means an individual’s decisions are affected by other household members’ behaviour. However, most existing analytical activity-travel scheduling studies focus on one-individual level, and assume that each household member makes activity-travel decisions independently. As a result, the estimation of activity participation may be biased. In this study, a household activity-travel scheduling model is proposed to investigate the interactions between two household members. The Markov decision process is employed to provide a framework of dynamic discrete choice process that allows household’s decisions to have complex interdependence over time. The impact of intra-household interactions on individual’s activity-travel scheduling behaviour is explicitly explored, and the variation in intra-household interactions across activity types is examined by the proposed model.