Digitisation of life: addressing behavioural shortcomings in agent-based activity-travel models

Participation in activities has become less constrained to physical location and time in the
digital era. Such activities as teleworking, distance learning and online shopping are shown to
have explicit impacts on activity choices and travel behaviours. For example, people engaged in
online shopping will reduced their visits to the brick-and-motor shops over the weekend.
However, they will visit the local post office more often in the weekdays during business hours
to pick up and/or send back goods shopped online. This research aims to investigate the broad
impact of digitisation on urban living and improve the activity generation and scheduling
module of the contemporary activity-travel models to accommodate the role and effects of
tele-activities. The proposed research is intended to enhance the overall framework of activitybased
travel demand model system and provide a toolkit to explore different policy scenarios in
the digital era. The research project outcome would be of interest to social science
professionals, policy makers, public health officials and transport planners.