An integrated spatio-temporal GIS toolkit for exploring intra-household interactions

This paper reports on the development of an integrated spatio-temporal GIS toolkit that facilitates the exploration of intra-household interactions. Two tools comprise the toolkit. The first tool, Space-Time Coincidence Analyst, identifies joint activity/travel episodes undertaken by household members. The core of this tool is a set of flexible criteria for classifying episodes as either joint or independent. The second tool, Space-Time Path Visualizer, not only displays space-time paths for household members, but also shows joint episodes undertaken by any two household members together. The toolkit can be applied to any household-based, activity/travel data set so long as required information is specified by the user. To demonstrate its usefulness for research, the toolkit is applied to the TAPS (Toronto Activity Panel Survey) 2002–03 data set. The results suggest that considerable variation exists in the number of joint activity/travel episodes identified using different classification criteria. Specifically, when using restrictive criteria (i.e., same timing, specific activity type/travel mode), only 2,265 joint activity/travel episodes are identified compared to 8,791 when using more flexible criteria. In turn, our results show that certain key attributes for independent and joint activity/travel episodes (i.e., frequency per household, starting time, ending time and duration) also vary under the different classification criteria.

Darren M. ScottEmail:

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Hejun Kang   is a PhD candidate in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University. She holds a MSc degree in Geographic Information Science from the University of Calgary. Her doctoral research concerns intra-household interactions in the context of activity/travel behavior. Darren M. Scott   is an Associate Professor of Geography at McMaster University. His current research centers on inter-agent decision making with regards to activity/travel behavior, and on issues concerning aggregation in activity-based travel demand models, most notably the treatment of space and the classification of activities.