Center for Activity Systems Analysis

An increased interest in the development and implementation of activity-based modeling approaches has been evident in the ISTEA era given federal mandates to improve current modeling practice. Several activity-based alternatives to conventional regional forecasting are presented. Each of these approaches integrates household activities, land use distributions, regional demographics and transportation networks in a framework that explicitly recognizes the complexity of travel behavior in terms of temporal and spatial constraints, household interactions, transport accessibility and its inherent activity-derived basis. A brief evaluation of the temporal stability of the proposed basic unit of analysis, the household's set of individual activity patterns, leads to a summary of a pattern-based generation model and the initial development of an activity-based microsimulation to replace the demand components of the conventional process.