Estimating Time of Day Demand with Errors in Reported Preferred Times: An Application to Airline Travel

An essential element of demand modeling in the airline industry is the representation of time of day demand—the demand for a given itinerary as a function of its departure or arrival times. It is an important datum that drives successful scheduling and fleet decisions. There are two key components to this problem: the distribution of the time of day demand and how preferred travel time influences itinerary choice. This paper focuses on estimating the time of day distribution. The objective is to estimate it in a manner that is not confounded with air travel supply; is a function of the characteristics of the traveler, the trip, and the market; and accounts for potential measurement errors in self-reported travel time preferences. The authors employ a stated preference dataset collected by intercepting people who were booking continental US trips via an internet booking service. Respondents reported preferred travel times as well as choices from a hypothetical set of itineraries. The authors parameterize the time of day distribution as a mixture of normal distributions (due to the strong peaking nature of travel time preferences) and allow the mixing function to vary by individual characteristics and trip attributes. The authors estimate the time of day distribution and the itinerary choice model jointly in a manner that can account for measurement error in the self-reported travel time preferences. The authors find that the mixture of normal distributions fits the time of day distribution well and is behaviorally intuitive, and the strongest covariates of travel time preferences are party size and time zone change. The methodology employed to treat self-reported travel time preferences as potentially having error contributes to the broader transportation time of day demand literature, which either assumes that the desired travel times are known with certainty or that they are unknown. We find that the error in self-reported travel time preferences is statistically significant and impacts the inferred time of day demand distribution.

• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B9853-52X1TRD-W-1&_cdi=59087&_user=10&_pii=S1877042811010718&_origin=browse&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2011&_sk=999829999&view=c&wchp=dGLbVlW-zSkzS&md5=356def38eea302df88d1d88699718b3c&ie=/sdarticle.pdf
• 
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/18770428
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Brey, Raul
  • Walker, Joan L
• Conference:
  • 19th International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory
  • Location: Berkeley CA, United States
  • Date: 2011-7-18 to 2011-7-20
• Publication Date: 2011

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 150-168
• Monograph Title: International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory, 19th
• Serial:
  • Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences
  • Volume: 17
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 1877-0428
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/18770428/53
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air transportation; Errors; Itinerary; Peak hour traffic; Periods of the day; Stated preferences; Travel demand; Travel time
• Uncontrolled Terms: Discrete choice; Latent demand
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01345398
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 21 2011 10:08AM