An Episode-Level Joint Model for Activity Engagement, Duration, and Destination Location Choice Decisions

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an episode-level activity generation and destination choice model. The model accommodates the occurrence of multiple episodes of an activity and captures interdependencies among travel choice dimensions that vary at the episode-level such as occurrence, duration, and destinations of episodes. A multiple discrete-continuous extreme value model with ordered preferences (MDCEV-OP) is adopted. This ordered preference extension of the modified MDCEV model imposes a restriction that the higher-numbered episodes do not occur without the occurrence of lower-numbered episodes. Further, destination accessibility from the destination choice utility is derived using a multinomial logit (MNL) model, which provides feedback to the MDCEV-OP through a logsum component. The findings of this study demonstrate the benefits of modeling activity engagement, duration, and destination at the granular level of episodes, including offering an enhanced behavioral realism of the model and the potential to improve forecasting accuracy and insights of activity-based models.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiple discrete-continuous choice models
• activity engagement
• activity duration
• destination accessibility
• episode-level activity generation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) – Discovery Grant for their financial support. The authors would like to thank the City of Kelowna for providing the data for analysis. The authors would also like to thank Corrie Thirkell for proofreading this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Authors contribution

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: S. Khaddar, S. Saxena, M. Fatmi, and A. Pinjari; data collection: S. Khaddar and M. Fatmi; analysis and interpretation of results: S. Khaddar, S. Saxena, M. Fatmi, and A. Pinjari; draft manuscript preparation: S. Khaddar, S. Saxena, M. Fatmi, and A. Pinjari.