Microscopic modeling of travel-demand: Approaching the home-to-work problem

In this article the results are described that have been found when tackling the problem of the assignment of employees to their working places (destination assignment) by using a truly microscopic approach, whose output is suitable for a microscopic traffic simulation. This problem is dealt with a microscopic stochastic analogue of the gravity ansatz of transportation planning, described in this article. However, the computation of the travel destinations is only the first step in a sequence of simulation steps. Its output will be used to compute a simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment (route assignment), resulting in travel times needed from home to work for any traveler. Those travel times will be used in a further reassignment step, where any traveler whose travel-time has exceeded a certain limit is subject to re-assigning a new working place (destination). This creates a sequence of re-assignment and re-routing processes, whose results will be reported in this article. The results obtained show that approach presented in this article is capable of describing the destination and route choices microscopically.