Abstract

The activity-based travel demand model recognizes that travel is derived from the demand for activity participation distributed in space. The focus on intra-household interactions and linkages between people’s behavior and social and physical environment has been identified as emerging features of the activity-based approach that would be important to travel behavior research. The dissertation is dedicated to an in-depth exploration of the within-household interactions by theoretical specification and empirical development of the household activity time allocation models based on a utility maximization framework with the household as the unit of analysis. Furthermore, the dissertation also aims to propose a model of the household activity scheduling process primarily focusing on task allocation mechanisms on the basis of the human agents adjusting themselves to the built social and physical environment. Development of the activity time allocation model in this dissertation includes two types of structural time allocation models. First, the collective models based on two assumptions that household heads have their own utility functions and that decisions by them reach Pareto-efficient outcomes are introduced to develop intra-household activity time allocation models for leisure demand and housework activity. Secondly, intra-household time allocation to housework activity is further examined through the estimation of time allocation to the different types of activities by the different types of household members along with extensive exploration of various theories and identification of related interactions. This dissertation proposes a household activity scheduling process with a model design based on a weekly pattern system, which is expected to keep various advantages compared to a deterministic daily model system. Along with learning and adaptation procedures, the human being as a learning agent is designed to prepare strategic schedules of behavior to achieve individual goals through interactive environments, and implement those plans via activity execution. At the household level, the household and its members as decision agents are also designed to optimize the allocation of the available household labor resource under the presence of the uncertainties of the physical and social environments. After describing the mathematical framework and solution procedure, a simulation experiment is conducted within a hypothetical environment to demonstrate how the proposed model works.