Abstract:
The existing literature in the activity-based modelling has emphasised the fact that individuals
schedule their activities keeping the whole-day activity pattern in their mind. Several attempts have
been made to integrate this with the network congestion; however, for explicit explanation of travel
behaviour of individuals further improvements are required. In this paper, a combined model is
proposed that deals with the scheduling of the home-work tour with time-varied network congestion
in a fixed point problem framework. Marginal utility profiles that represent individual time-of-day
preferences and satiation effect of the activities are incorporated for the measurement of the utility
of activity engagement along with the disutility of travel. It has been noticed that consideration of
only time-of-day dependent marginal utility profiles of activities in the utility function does not
appropriately integrate the activities and travel within the tour. The proof of this has been shown
analytically and numerically. This finding contradicts with the earlier researches that have been
done to integrate morning-evening commutes together with the network congestion. Additionally,
the results of two numerical experiments are presented in the paper. In the first experiment, an
arbitrary dynamic tolling strategy is assumed and then a detailed analysis is performed to show
the variation in the balance of trade-offs involved in the process. The second experiment is conducted
to assess the sensitivity of the combined model through incorporation of different dynamic traffic
loading models. Some meaningful observations are drawn from these experiments and are discussed
with the identification of avenues for future research.