Integrated scheduling of daily work activities and morning-evening commutes with bottleneck congestion

Previous analysis of bottleneck congestion and departure time choice have focused on the trade-off between queuing delay cost and early/late arrival penalty for a given work start schedule. The actual scheduling of travel and work activities may well depend on some other important factors, such as the travel cost of the after-work trip, the work duration and the utility variation of different work times. This paper attempts to link the home-to-work and work-to-home trip schedules via the work duration. The morning home-to-work and evening work-to-home travel costs are calculated by the bottleneck queuing models and each individual's work utility is determined according to his/her work start time and end time with a predetermined marginal timing utility function. Travelers make a tradeoff between travel cost minimization and stay-at-home and work utility maximization in choosing their travel and activity schedules. A discrete choice model is used to predict the dynamic evolution process and stationary distribution of individual schedule patterns. After specifying various kinds of timing utility functions with different degrees of flexibility in work hour schemes, a set of numerical experiments are conducted and some meaningful observations are made from the experiment results, particularly on the effect of flexible work hours on traffic congestion mitigation.