An Activity-Journey-Network Approach for Modelling Travel Behaviour of Multiple User Classes Under Time Constraints

The flow pattern on a given transportation network at a given moment results from many users’ travel decisions which are made for some purposes, for example, participating in necessary activities such as work, eating and shopping. Consequently, the explicit modelling of the interaction between users’ activity and travel choice behaviour serves as a basic building block for long-term transportation planning and management. In this paper, an activity-based network user equilibrium model is proposed to study the dynamic activity-travel scheduling problem with multiple classes of users under time constraints. A simple supernetwork representation approach is introduced to generate the activity-journey-network (AJN) which expands the basic transportation network in both time and space dimensions. With the supernetwork representation, the dynamic activity-travel scheduling problem is transformed into a static network flow assignment problem. A heuristic algorithm is developed to find the path with the maximum utility in the AJN from the start node to the end node for each user. A numerical study is conducted to illustrate the application of the proposed model and solution algorithm for several transportation networks including large-scale real-world networks. It is shown that both the individual’s travel choice and group travel behaviour in a transportation network can be well studied by the proposed model.