University of California Transportation Center

The focus of this paper is on the demonstration that some rather well-known network-based formulation 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 household in conducting their daily affairs outside the home, while preserving the utility-maximizing principle presumed to guide such decisions. A mathematical programming formulation is developed and used to identify the similarities and difference between traditional trip-based modeling methodologies and those pertaining to an activity-based approach. It is demonstrated that the two approaches are directly related.