Modeling workers’ daily out-of-home maintenance activity participation and duration

Abstract

This paper applies a multiple discrete–continuous choice model to determine worker’s decisions on interdependencies of maintenance activity participation and duration over different time periods in a worker’s day. To accommodate household effect, each time period is further defined according to whether the maintenance activities were conducted independently or jointly with other household members. Using the household survey data from the New York metropolitan area, the worker’s participation and duration decisions were jointly estimated for four time periods, including the morning commute, midday, evening commute, and after evening commute. To account for the censored nature of the duration data, a “censored system of equations” proposed by Shonkwiler and Yen was adopted and modified to increase asymptotic efficiency of the parameter estimates. Despite simplicity of the model and its ease of implementation, the estimation results offer valuable insights into the effects of socio-demographics, land use density, transportation service, and work duration characteristics on worker’s daily scheduling of maintenance activities and travel in a highly urbanized environment.

Keywords

• Maintenance activities
• Activity timing and duration
• Discrete–continuous choice model
• Household survey