Development of a household travel resource allocation model

Abstract

Households allocate their travel resources – vehicles, time, budget, and supervision – to accomplish activities while minimizing overall time and cost subject to a set of constraints – the duration and sequence of activities, and the need to provide transportation to dependent travellers. In this research, we develop and test a heuristic based approach to schedule activities using a cost (disutility) minimization objective. The model is evaluated by comparing predicted schedules generated by the heuristics to actual travel patterns reported by participant households. While the dataset is small – only 14 households are included – the model successfully identifies tours for households of various compositions and demographics. The research is important in the local context as the study area – the Region of Waterloo, Canada – is a largely auto-dependent metropolitan area that is building a 19km, $818M (CDN) Light Rail Transit (LRT) system intended to increase public transport use and influence land use change. The Region is amongst the smallest municipalities in North America to implement this infrastructure.