Integrated scheduling of daily work activities and morning-evening commutes with bottleneck congestion

Xiaoning Zhang, Hai Yang, Hai-Jun Huang () and H. Michael Zhang

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2005, vol. 39, issue 1, 41-60

Abstract: Previous analysis of bottleneck congestion and departure time choice have focused on the trade-off between queuing delay cost and early/late arrival penalty for a given work start schedule. The actual scheduling of travel and work activities may well depend on some other important factors, such as the travel cost of the after-work trip, the work duration and the utility variation of different work times. This paper attempts to link the home-to-work and work-to-home trip schedules via the work duration. The morning home-to-work and evening work-to-home travel costs are calculated by the bottleneck queuing models and each individual's work utility is determined according to his/her work start time and end time with a predetermined marginal timing utility function. Travelers make a tradeoff between travel cost minimization and stay-at-home and work utility maximization in choosing their travel and activity schedules. A discrete choice model is used to predict the dynamic evolution process and stationary distribution of individual schedule patterns. After specifying various kinds of timing utility functions with different degrees of flexibility in work hour schemes, a set of numerical experiments are conducted and some meaningful observations are made from the experiment results, particularly on the effect of flexible work hours on traffic congestion mitigation.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965-8564(04)00106-5
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:39:y:2005:i:1:p:41-60

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().