Traveler Centric Trip Planning: A Behavioral-Driven System

Trip planning is a well-cited problem that has been typically addressed, to a large extent, as a shortest distance path-finding problem that can be extended to reflect temporal objectives and/or constraints. This paper takes an alternative perspective to the trip-planning problem in the sense of it being a behavioral driven problem, thus allowing for multitudes of traveler centric objectives and constraints, as well as aspects of the environment, as they pertain to the traveler preferences to be incorporated in the process. This paper introduces a Behavior Driven Trip Planner (BDTP) to operate as an in-vehicle guidance system. The BDTP is designed as a modular system that combines linguistic road assessment with traveler-centric decision-making. This paper introduces traveler's doctrines, a concept that synthesizes the traveler's specific demands. Hard attributes/objectives, such as time windows and trip monetary allowances, are enforced in the process of determining the final decision about the trip. This paper introduces the underlying mathematical formulation for the developed system and explains how the formulation works to achieve the optimal performance. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the system to capture and respond to traveler preferences under a wide range of scenarios.