Identifying Core vs. Non-Core Activities of Household Members

Abstract

Understanding scheduling behavior of households has been the focus of research for nearly half a century. Presumably activity engagement is being impacted by the importance of the activity to household members as well as time and cost constraints. Depending on the level of time budget, household members would eliminates some activities from the agenda or replace them with higher priority ones. In this paper, in order to capture the importance of different activities, we propose a methodology to schedule household activities under different levels of uncertainty about the importance of the activity. In this approach we combine discrete choice models and concepts of Fuzzy logic to identify core versus non-core activities in the agenda. The possibility of inclusion of an activity is the agenda is computed by estimating the expected importance of the activity and mapping to a set of fuzzy graphs. Activity scheduling and selection is then modeled as the outcome of a mixed integer optimization problem, in which the objective function is maximizing the expected desirability gained from activities and total saved time, subject to network connectivity, time windows, time budget and cost budget constraints.