Abstract:

In order to analyze travelers’ departure time and route adjustment behavior under bounded rationality, we introduce the prospect theory to describe route choice behavior. Travel behavior is assumed to obey the mechanisms as follows: commuters make a travel time budget according to the maximum punctual arrival probability firstly, set it as the reference point, and then calculate the prospect value of each alternative path and select the path with the maximum prospect value as the travel path. Commuters adopt travel information to adjust the departure time for the next travel. A steady state can thus be achieved after repeated trips. We establish a bi-level user equilibrium model in this paper based on the travel time budget and the prospect theory, and employ the methods of successive average and genetic algorithm to solve the model. In the end, an example is used to test the model and the algorithm. We also analyze the relationship among time budget, route prospect and punctual arrival probability under three different choice rules.

Key words: prospect theory, travel time budget, on-time arrival probability, bi-level model