Center for Activity Systems Analysis

The focus of this paper is on the demonstration that some rather well-known network-based formulations in operations research that have heretofore largely gone unnoticed in activity-based travel research offer a potentially powerful technique for advancing the general development of the activity-based modeling approach. These formulations can provide an analytical framework that unifies the complex interactions among the resource allocation decisions made by households in conducting their daily affairs outside the home while preserving the utility-maximizing principles presumed to guide such decisions. A mathematical programming formulation is developed and used to identify the similarities and differences between traditional trip-based modeling methodologies and those pertaining to an activity-based approach. It is demonstrated that the two approaches are directly related.