Rezvany, N., Bierlaire, M., and Hillel, T. (2023)

Simulating intra-household interactions for in- and out-of-home activity scheduling

Various interactions, time arrangements, and constraints exist for individuals scheduling their day as a member of a household, which affect their in-home as well as out-of-home activity schedule. However, the existing activity-based models are mostly based on the individual decision-making process, which are limited in their demonstration of behaviour. We simulate multiple intra-household interaction dimensions within the same framework and capture the coordination of the activity scheduling decisions among all household members. Our approach adopts the Optimisation-based Activity Scheduling Integrating Simultaneous choice dimensions (OASIS) framework, which is at the level of isolated individuals and focuses on out-of-home activity schedules. We jointly simulate in- and out-of-home activities and incorporate interactions into the framework. Our framework contributes to the state-of-the-art in activity-based modelling by explicitly capturing multiple interactions within the same model, such as the allocation of the private vehicle to household members, dividing household maintenance responsibilities, escorting, joint activity participation, and sharing rides. We operationalise the model using time-use-survey data from the United Kingdom. The simulation results demonstrate the ability of the framework to capture complex intra-household interactions. We then demonstrate how these interactions can cause individuals to deviate from their schedules planned in isolation. This is a general framework applicable to different household compositions and available resources.