A mathematical programming formulation of the household activity rescheduling problem

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. 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 mixed integer linear program formulation of the Household Activity Pattern Problem (HAPP) by embedding in the household activity schedule decision process a means of capturing uncertainty by introducing the dynamics of rescheduling.