Activity chains and travel in Belgium

This project comes within the framework of a POST DOC Fellowship under the European Program Improving Human Research
Potential.
It consists of a developing research on activity
chain methodologies for application in transport
policy assessment.
Activity chains is a description of the activities
of household members with their localization, from
which a number of information concerning travel
demand can be derived. This modern approach to
Transportation disaggregate demand analysis allows
in particular the interactions of conflicting
trip patterns within a single household to be
taken into account, leading in turn to realistic
appraisal of new transportation policies in term
of their impact of the households everyday life.

The purpose of the project is to explore to what
extent activity chaining and the associated
household interaction, and therefore the basic
models leading to disaggregate travel demand, may
be described using the discrete choice modeling
techniques, a very classical tool in
transportation research.

In particular the project intends to investigate whether there is any pragmatic advantage to defining a household utility on top of the
utilities associated with its members. The analysis will be carried out using the data from the Belgian National Mobility Survey 1999 and,
possibly, the some years of the British National Travel Survey.