Route choice modeling: past, present and future research directions

Abstract

Modeling route choice behavior is problematic, but essential to appraise travelers' perceptions of route characteristics, to forecast travelers' behavior under hypothetical scenarios, to predict future traffic conditions on transportation networks and to understand travelers' reaction and adaptation to sources of information.This paper reviews the state of the art in the analysis of route choice behavior within the discrete choice modeling framework. The review covers both choice set generation and choice process, since present research directions show growing interest in understanding the role of choice set size and composition on model estimation and flow prediction, while past research directions illustrate larger efforts toward the enhancement of stochastic route choice models rather than toward the development of realistic choice set generation methods.This paper also envisions future research directions toward the improvement in amount and quality of collected data, the consideration of the latent nature of the set of alternatives, the definition of route relevance and choice set efficiency measures, the specification of models able to contextually account for taste heterogeneity and substitution patterns, and the adoption of random constraint approaches to represent jointly choice set formation and choice process.