Because of the continuing increase in congestion, and the application of demand management measures and policies that aim to spread travel demand more across the day, departure time choice has become an important additional component in transport modelling systems. The choice of departure time is a continuous process in time, rather than a choice between discrete time periods; however, the assignment process employs discrete time period origin-destination (OD) matrices. Hence, in departure time choice models the step from continuous to discretised time must be made, and under certain conditions this is possible. In this paper the background of such models is described, which are developed in a UK's Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) research project for interfacing with commercial assignment software. Later, these will be tested on real-life networks, and compared with observations and more conventional logit models. (A)
Abstract