A Combined Trip Generation and Distribution Model and Persons’ Time Allocation Behaviour

Persons' travel behavior at aggregate level can be examined in a 24-hour time scale. Individuals will allocate a part of this limited time to an out-of-home time in order to accomplish his or her activity schedule during a day. Such an out-of-home time available would be determined so as to maximize his or her utility in relation to the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals. Another important factor is the time spent at activities in which individuals engage and at each zone where individuals act. But because the primal travel model output required is the spatial patterns of trips and because of simplification of model, only the zone sojourn time is used in this paper. In the analysis of the spatial patterns of trips, recent works are focusing on the trip chain analysis. This study assumes the Markov property for the persons' travel behavior and also focuses on the spatial sequence of trip generation rather than the activity choice and sequencing: that is, an issue is made of the continuous trip process that people start from home in the morning visit, other zones consecutively and finally return home at night. The study analyzes such a trip process by the Markov renewal theory and derives the trip equations for dynamic travel behavior and finally gets a combined trip generation and distribution model from the dynamic trip equations as a stationary trip process, which includes the zone sojourn time allocated for activities at each zone as well as the out-of-home available time.