Network-oriented household activity pattern problem for system optimization

The recently emerging trend of self-driving vehicles and information sharing technologies, made available by private technology vendors, starts creating a revolutionary paradigm shift in the coming years for traveler mobility applications. By considering a deterministic traveler decision making framework at the household level in congested transportation networks, this paper aims to address the challenges of how to optimally schedule individuals’ daily travel patterns under the complex activity constraints and interactions. We reformulate two special cases of household activity pattern problem (HAPP) through a high-dimensional network construct, and offer a systematic comparison with the classical mathematical programming models proposed by Recker (1995). Furthermore, we consider the tight road capacity constraint as another special case of HAPP to model complex interactions between multiple household activity scheduling decisions, and this attempt offers another household-based framework for linking activity-based model (ABM) and dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) tools. Through embedding temporal and spatial relations among household members, vehicles and mandatory/optional activities in an integrated space-time-state network, we develop two 0–1 integer linear programming models that can seamlessly incorporate constraints for a number of key decisions related to vehicle selection, activity performing and ridesharing patterns under congested networks. The well-structured network models can be directly solved by standard optimization solvers, and further converted to a set of time-dependent state-dependent least cost path-finding problems through Lagrangian relaxation, which permit the use of computationally efficient algorithms on large-scale high-fidelity transportation networks.