Abstract Manager

At the present time, even the most sophisticated operational activity-based travel models are single-day in formulation, modelling a single, typical weekday. These could always be criticized on several grounds, notably: (1) ignoring weekend travel entirely, which is of considerable policy importance from many perspectives; and (2) ignoring day-to-day interconnections – what I do today may well influence what I do tomorrow, while what I plan to do tomorrow may well influence what I do today. And now, in the post-pandemic hybrid world in which we live, there is no longer any such thing as a “typical day” – travel on Wednesdays is very different from travel on Fridays, and so the notion of a “typical day” (always something of a “useful fiction”) represents a potentially dangerous aggregation bias.

This presentation explores the need and potential for developing practical week-long agent-based microsimulation models of urban activity and travel. It first presents the case for developing such models from both behavioural representation and policy analysis perspectives. It then briefly reviews the (limited) literature on multi-day/week-long modelling. Practical challenges in modelling at the weekly level are then discussed. Next, it sketches how the current TASHA (Travel/Activity Scheduler for Household Agents) conceptual framework can be extended to a week-long application. The paper concludes with brief concluding comments on next research steps.