Inter-personal interactions and constraints in travel behavior within households and social networks

Excerpt

The need for modeling interactions between agents and the impact these interactions can have on activity–travel patterns has received much attention in recent years, with much of this attention focused on interactions between agents of a single household. Eric Miller has stated that, “much of the behavior of interest (in integrated urban modeling) involves the interaction among people” (Miller 2006). The first such effects to be studied and incorporated in travel demand models were interactions within households, for example serving dependents, modeling joint trips, task allocation and joint scheduling (Miller and Roorda 2003). Several of these features are now common aspects of activity-based models implemented by planning agencies, e.g. the CT-RAMP family of models (Vovsha et al. 2010). However, it is clear that many types of interaction behavior can occur outside of the household context and that even within the household many types of interaction behavior still remain to be studied and modeled. The effects of agent-interactions and the constraints on behavior that they can impose are still only partially understood. In addition, while much work has been done on understanding the basic characteristics and formation processes of social networks outside of the household and their impacts on aspects of activity–travel (e.g. Habib and Carrasco 2011), comparatively little has been done to integrate these findings into activity-based model frameworks as suggested by Arentze and Timmermans (2008). More theoretical understanding of the behaviors that govern agent interactions, both within and outside of the household, and especially on how information exchange and decision-making occurs within agent groups is needed. In other words, understanding more fully how agents cooperate, negotiate, learn from and plan with each other, and more importantly, understanding how these interactions can be modeled and simulated, is a pressing research need in integrated urban transportation modeling. The papers presented in this issue address aspects of agent-interactions both within and outside of the household context and present important findings for advancing the state of agent interaction modeling. …