Individual departure time decision considering departure scheduling utility

The scheduling utility plays a fundamental role in addressing the commuting travel behaviours. In this paper, a new scheduling utility, termed as DMRD-SU, was suggested based on some recent research findings in behavioural economics. DMRD-SU admitted the existence of positive arrival-caused utility. In addition, besides the travel-time-caused utility and arrival-caused utility, DMRD-SU firstly took the departure utility into account. The necessity of the departure utility in trip scheduling was analysed comprehensively, and the corresponding individual trip scheduling model was presented. Based on a simple network, an analytical example was executed to characterize DMRD-SU. It can be found from the analytical example that: 1) DMRD-SU can predict the accumulation departure behaviors at NDT, which explains the formation of daily serious short-peak-hours in reality, while MRD-SU cannot; 2) compared with MRD-SU, DMRD-SU predicts that people tend to depart later and its gross utility also decrease faster. Therefore, the departure utility should be considered to describe the traveler's scheduling behaviors better.