Professor Mohammadian and CME student Joshua Auld win the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award

The Kitamura Paper Award

The travel behavior and modeling community lost a great thinker and researcher with the passing of Professor Ryuichi Kitamura on February 19, 2009. In honor of his commitment to student success and co-authorship of papers, the Travel Analysis Methods Section (ADB00) of the Transportation Research Board has instituted the Ryuichi Kitamura Award for the Best Paper by a Student co-authored with a Mentor.

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the TRB Travel Analysis Methods Section Kitamura Paper Award is:

“Planning Constrained Destination Choice in the ADAPTS Activity Based Model”

by Joshua Auld and Kouros Mohammadian, University of Illinois, Chicago

Abstract

This paper describes a destination choice model estimated for Chicago using a recent survey and a previously developed model of activity planning decision timing. The travel survey data is used to estimate both a standard multinomial destination choice model and a model where the choice set is constrained by what has already been planned in the schedule. The performance of each model is evaluated and the impact of using the planning-constrained model in place of the standard model on the accuracy of the results is evaluated. The use of a model where the destination choices are conditioned on what has been previously planned improves the accuracy of the model. This is true in terms of correctly predicted location choices and especially in terms of overall trip length distributions where more realistic distributions are observed when decisions are constrained.