Conceptual and methodological approaches to representing, understanding, analysing and modelling travel behaviour

Principal investigator: Professor John Polak

Lead institution: Imperial College of London

The overall aim of this twelve month scanning exercise is to draw together leading figures from the field of travel behaviour and the wider social and behavioural sciences and from the practitioner community in order to consider current conceptual and methodological approaches to understanding and modelling travel behaviour. It seeks to identify the most fruitful directions to enrich the treatment of agent choice behaviour in models of travel demand and the most effective means of accelerating the propagating of useful theoretical developments into practice. The specific objectives include: developing new interdisciplinary networks bridging transport, economics, economic psychology, geography and sociology; exploring opportunities for fruitful cross fertilisation of ideas across disciplinary boundaries and critically reviewing the current state of the art in the modelling of travel behaviour focusing in particular on issues of agent choice (rather than overall model systems). Workshops covering the areas of conceptual developments, theories of agent choice behaviour, data collection methods, and econometric and statistical issues will help develop a road map for future research in this area.