Individual departure time decision considering departure scheduling utility

Abstract

The scheduling utility plays a fundamental role in addressing the commuting travel behaviours. A new scheduling utility, termed as DMRD-SU, was suggested based on some recent research findings in behavioural economics. DMRD-SU admitted the existence of positive arrival-caused utility. In addition, besides the travel-time-caused utility and arrival-caused utility, DMRD-SU firstly took the departure utility into account. The necessity of the departure utility in trip scheduling was analyzed comprehensively, and the corresponding individual trip scheduling model was presented. Based on a simple network, an analytical example was executed to characterize DMRD-SU. It can be found from the analytical example that: 1) DMRD-SU can predict the accumulation departure behaviors at NDT, which explains the formation of daily serious short-peak-hours in reality, while MRD-SU cannot; 2) Compared with MRD-SU, DMRD-SU predicts that people tend to depart later and its gross utility also decreases faster. Therefore, the departure utility should be considered to describe the traveler’s scheduling behaviors better.

Keywords

trip scheduling / scheduling utility / reference-dependence / departure utility

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