Comparative Analysis of Discrete Choice Approaches for Modeling Destination Choices of Urban Home-Based Trips to Work

Discrete choice models based on the Random Utility Maximization (RUM) approach are alternatives to traditional aggregated trip distribution models. However, the Random Regret Minimization (RRM) approach has emerged as an alternative to RUM for analyzing behavioral phenomena. This study compares the RUM and RRM approaches to model the destination choice of urban home-based trips to work, with a case study in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The attributes of distance between traffic analysis zones (TAZs), total number of jobs, and number of jobs per type (industry and services) were considered, and the attributes referring to TAZs in commercial areas were tested in different models. We combined a method to estimate the optimal choice set size and a stratified sampling method to choose alternatives from available choices for a destination-choice problem with many alternatives. The RUM and RRM models produced similar results with respect to the final log-likelihood, rho(2), Akaike information criterion, and Bayesian information criterion for the studied case. However, the RRM models required 52 min to be estimated on average, whereas estimation of the RUM models took only 31 s on average. Models derived from the RUM approach including the total number of jobs and distance produced higher accuracy, requiring less computational time to estimate the parameters.