Stochastic Preplanned Household Activity Pattern Problem with Uncertain Activity Participation (SHAPP)

The so-called activity-based approach to analysis of human interaction with the social and physical environments dates back to the original time-space geography works of Hägerstrand and his colleagues at the Lund School in 1970. Despite their obvious theoretical attractiveness, activity-based approaches to understanding and predicting travel behavior have suffered from the absence of an analytical framework that unifies the complex interactions among the resource allocation decisions made by households in conducting their daily affairs outside the home, while preserving the utility-maximizing principles presumed to guide such decisions. In this paper, we develop a computationally-tractable system, based on an extension and modification of some rather well-known network-based formulations in operations research, to model human dynamics in uncertain environments. The research builds on the mathematical programming formulation of the Household Activity Pattern Problem (HAPP) by embedding stochastic elements in the planned household activity schedule decision process that capture the uncertainty of the need for rescheduling.