Modeling households activity participation decisions in a rule-based system of travel demand

This paper describes an empirical derivation of an activity participation choice model at the household level decisions taking into account the allocated activities and joint activity participation of household heads in discretionary activities. The households that we consider here are two-heads households; each is either a worker or non-worker. Attributes of households, such as, for example the presence of young children, attributes of the work activities and space-time settings are considered as explanatory variables. To deal with this large set of attributes and account for non-linear relationships between the variables, a decision tree induction method – CHAID – is used to derive a decision tree model. We show how the decision tree model can be used as a component in an activity-scheduling model, ALBATROSS, to predict travel demand in an activity-based-micro-simulation system. The model shows a satisfactory performance as indicated by its goodness-of-fit on validation data.