Departure Time Choice in Schedule-Based Transit Assignment

This paper investigates existing departure time models for a schedule-based transit assignment and their parametrization. It analyzes the impact of the temporal resolution of travel demand and suggests functions for evaluating the adaptation time as part of the utility of a path. The adaptation time quantifies the time between the preferred and the scheduled departure times. The findings of the analysis suggested that travel demand should be discretized into intervals of 1 min, with interval borders right between the full minute, that is, ±0.5 min. It was shown that longer time intervals led to arbitrary run volumes, even for origin–destination pairs with just one transit line and a fixed headway. Although a linear relationship between adaptation time and adaptation disutility is a common assumption in several publications, it cannot represent certain types of passenger behavior. For some trip purposes, passengers may be insensitive to small adaptation times, but highly sensitive to large adaptations. This requires a nonlinear evaluation function.