IMPROVING THE REPRESENTATION OF WITHIN-HOUSEHOLD INTERACTIONS IN ALBATROSS: A STUDY OF HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITY-TRAVEL BEHAVIOR

The majority studies in activity-based analysis in transportation research are based on individual decision making. However, it is more realistic to model activity-travel patterns from the perspective of a household to capture the interrelationship of household members' activity-travel patterns. To contribute to this expanding field, this study argues that there is a need for incorporating household decision making in travel demand modeling. The daily activity-travel patterns of individuals often reflect interactions with other household members, in particular in the form of joint activity participation, task and resource allocation. Given this argument, this study discusses the summary of a systematic re-engineering of the ALBATROSS model from a household perspective. The choices are modeled as a function of a collection of conditions, subjects to various kinds of constraints, formalized as decision tree. The results demonstrate that, overall, the predictions of the new version model are equivalent or slightly better than the old model for most aspects.