Optimization and Discrete Choice in Urban Systems


Book Description

'l'he papers contained in this volume were originally presented at the International symposium on New Directions in Urban Systems Modelling held at the University of Waterloo in July, 1983. The papers have been reviewed and rewritten since that time. The exception is the introductory paper written specially by Manfred Fischer and Peter Nijkamp as an introduction to this volume. The manuscript was prepared in the word processing unit in the nepartment of Civil Engineering, university of Waterloo. The sustained work of Mrs. I. Steffler in preparing this manuscript is gratefully acknowledged. "'r. R. K. Kumar provided excellent assistance with the editorial process. The svrnposium and the preparation of this manuscript were supporteö financially by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, The Academic Development Fund and the Department of Civil Engineering, TTniversity of waterloo. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE •....••...•..•...•..........•..••.•....•.•••.••.••.•..•••••.•.••.. III Categorical Data and Choice Analysis in a Spatial Context Manfred Fischer and Peter Nijkamp .•••....•.......•.•.....•.......•.......




The Economics of Urban Transportation


Book Description

This new edition of the seminal textbook The Economics of Urban Transportation incorporates the latest research affecting the design, implementation, pricing, and control of transport systems in towns and cities. The book offers an economic framework for understanding the societal impacts and policy implications of many factors including congestion, traffic safety, climate change, air quality, COVID-19, and newly important developments such as ride-hailing services, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, the third edition features a new chapter on the special challenges of managing the energy that powers transportation systems. It provides fully updated coverage of well-known topics and a rigorous treatment of new ones. All of the basic topics needed to apply economics to urban transportation are included: Forecasting demand for transportation services under various conditions Measuring costs, including those incurred by users and incorporating two new tools to describe congestion in dense urban areas Setting prices under practical constraints Evaluating infrastructure investments Understanding how private and public sectors interact to provide services Written by three of the field’s leading researchers, The Economics of Urban Transportation is essential reading for students, researchers, and practicing professionals in transportation economics, planning, engineering, or related disciplines. With a focus on workable models that can be adapted to future needs, it provides tools for a rapidly changing world.




Digital Social Networks and Travel Behaviour in Urban Environments


Book Description

This book brings together conceptual and empirical insights to explore the interconnections between social networks based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and travel behaviour in urban environments. Over the past decade, rapid development of ICT has led to extensive social impacts and influence on travel and mobility patterns within urban spaces. A new field of research of digital social networks and travel behaviour is now emerging. This book presents state-of-the-art knowledge, cutting-edge research and integrated analysis methods from the fields of social networks, travel behaviour and urban analysis. It explores the challenges related to the question of how we can synchronize among social networks activities, transport means, intelligent communication/information technologies and the urban form. This innovative book encourages multidisciplinary insights and fusion among three disciplines of social networks, travel behaviour and urban analysis. It offers new horizons for research and will be of interest to students and scholars studying mobilities, transport studies, urban geography, urban planning, the built environment and urban policy.




Urban Rhythms and Travel Behaviour


Book Description

The recent availability of longitudinal data on individual trip making and activity behaviour has provided analysts with new insights into the structures and motives of daily life travel. Multi-week travel diary data-sets and GPS observations are exciting sources of information for the description and modelling of the variability of individual travel patterns. Through an analysis of these strong new data sets, this book questions what are the most suitable methodological tools to represent the structures of long-term travel behaviour. It also examines what the data tells us about the travellers' motives and looks at how planning should translate the findings into forecasting tools and transport strategies. In doing so, the multifaceted and ambiguous character of daily life travel is revealed, illustrating how, while sound routines in time and space seem to dominate daily life, individuals show a considerable amount of variability and flexibility in travel and activity behaviour.




Spatial Interaction Modelling


Book Description

In this book, the author's strong commitment to the multi-disciplinary field of regional science emerges to provide a unifying framework between spatial modelling traditions from quantitative geography and those from spatial economics, whereby each is enhanced. Starting with a detailed discussion of each field illustrated with numerical examples, the two traditions are brought together by either making the economic models probabilistic or transforming the objectives of the geographic models to reflect both utility theory and production theory. The ideas are applied to develop urban models of activity analysis, face-to-face contacts and housing supply, as well as regional models in the areas of input-output analysis, imperfect competition and interregional migration.




Econometric Analysis of Discrete Choice


Book Description

This book is a treatise on empirical microeconomics: it describes the econometric theory of qualitative choice models and the empirical practice of modeling consumer demand for a heterogeneous commodity, housing. Accordingly, the book has two parts. The first part gives a self-contained survey of discrete choice models with emphasis on nested and related multinomial logit models. The second part concentrates on three sUbstantive questions about housing demand and how they can be answered using discrete choice models. Why combine these two distinct parts in one book? It is the interaction between theory and application in empirical microeconomics on which we focus in this book. Hence, emphasis in the methodological part is on practicability, and emphasis in the applied part is on the usage of the proper econometric specifications. Econometrics means measuring economic phenomena. Because nature (ironically, in the case of economics, this is most often the government) rarely provides us with well-defined economic experiments, measurement of economic phenomena usually requires an elaborate statistical apparatus that is able to separate concurrent and confounding phenomena. Discrete choice models have proved to be a very convenient apparatus to study the complex issues in housing demand. We present models, techniques, and statistical problems of discrete choice in the first and methodological part of the book, written in conventional textbook style.




Impact Assessment and Evaluation in Transportation Planning


Book Description

Impact Assessment and Evaluation in Transportation Planning contains a refreshing approach to transportation planning by integrating impact analysis and evaluation methodology. It is original in that impact assessment and evaluation are brought together in a coherent framework. It is novel in the history of transportation science and particularly suitable as a pedagogical text, since methodologies are illustrated with various case studies and examples. It is particularly suitable for practitioners and students who want to become acquainted with conflict analysis and plan/project evaluation in the area of transportation planning.




Dynamical Systems


Book Description

The investigation of special topics in systems dynamics -uncertain dynamic processes, viability theory, nonlinear dynamics in models for biomathematics, inverse problems in control systems theory-has become a major issue at the System and Decision Sciences Research Program of the International Insti tute for Applied Systems Analysis. The above topics actually reflect two different perspectives in the investigation of dynamic processes. The first, motivated by control theory, is concerned with the properties of dynamic systems that are stable under vari ations in the systems' parameters. This allows us to specify classes of dynamic systems for which it is possible to construct and control a whole "tube" of trajectories assigned to a system with uncertain parameters and to resolve some inverse problems of control theory within numerically stable solution schemes. The second perspective is to investigate generic properties of dynamic systems that are due to nonlinearity (as bifurcations theory, chaotic behavior, stability properties, and related problems in the qualitative theory of differential systems). Special stress is given to the applications of non linear dynamic systems theory to biomathematics and ecoloey.




Toward Interactive and Intelligent Decision Support Systems


Book Description

These proceedings include papers presented at the VII-th Internatio nal Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making which was held in Kyoto/Japan on August 18-22, 1986. Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) has been a greatly import ant subject in many practical fields, for example, in planning, design, control and management in both private and public sectors. After remark able developments of theory, methodology and pilot case studies in rec ent years, it is now facing the stage of real applications and develop ment of more sophisticated methodology as interactive intelligent decision support systems. The conference aimed to provide a significant contribu tion to the future of MCDM as one of total systems including human factors: Substantial emphasis was given to knowledge engineering and cognitive sci ence. The conference inherits the tradition and the style of the previous conferences: (1) Jouy-en-Josas/France (1975), (2) Buffalo/U.S.A. (1977), (3) Konigswinter/FRG (1978), (4) Delaware/U.S.A. (1980), (5) Mons/Belgium (1982), (6) Cleveland/U.S.A. (1984). This time a great many Japanese com panies provided grants for the conference. As a result, the total number of participants was over 120, and a computer demonstration could be reali zed on an extensive scale as well as the conference sessions. Throughout the conference, it was observed that MCDM is making steady progress not only in theory but also as a tool for decision support.




Aspiration Based Decision Support Systems


Book Description

It is not easy to summarize -even in a volume -the results of a scientific study con ducted by circa 30 researchers, in four different research institutions, though cooperating between them and jointly with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, but working part-time, sponsored not only by IIASA's national currency funds, but also by several other research grants in Poland. The aims of this cooperative study were de fined broadly by its title Theory, Software and Testing Examples for Decision Support Systems. The focusing theme was the methodology of decision analysis and support related to the principle of reference point optimization (developed by the editors of this volume and called also variously: aspiration-led decision support, quasi-satisfying framework of rationality, DIDAS methodology etc. ). This focusing theme motivated extensive theoretical research - from basic methodological issues of decision analysis, through various results in mathematical programming (in the fields of large scale and stochastic optimization, nondifferentiable optimization, cooperative game theory) mo tivated and needed because of this theme, through methodological issues related to software development to issues resulting from testing and applications. We could not include in this volume all papers -theoretical, methodological, appiied, software manu als and documentation -written during this cooperative study.




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