Dynamic model of activity-type choice and scheduling

This paper presents a model for the choice of activity-type and timing, incorporating the dynamics of scheduling, estimated on a six-week travel diary. The main focus of the study is the inclusion of past history of activity involvement and its influence on current activity choice. The econometric formulation adopted, explicitly accounts both for correlation across alternatives and for state dependency. The results indicate that behavioral variables are superior to socio-economic variables and that consideration of the correlation pattern over alternatives clearly improves the fit of the model. This is a first but significant contribution to changing the current static demand models into dynamic activity based ones. The availability of other multi-week travel surveys and the progress made recently on advanced econometric techniques should encourage the transferability of this study to different regions or model scale.