Study On Modal Choice Of Urban Resident Based On The Prospect Theory

Traffic jam has become an important factor in the city’s economic development and the improvement of people’s living standards in China, it is the ultimate solution to build a sustainable transport system, which must be based on completely understanding of urban residents travel habits and trends. Aiming to improve the transportation behavior decision-making and forecast method, the prospect theory is used to study the modal choice of urban residents, which has the good theoretical and practical significance.The state-of-art of the modal choice and the uncertainty of decision theory are summarized, and the main factors that influence the residents’ travel mode choice also are analyzed. There are two defects in traditional modal choice models, one is ignoring the uncertainty, the other is not considering the different preference between the travelers with different travel characteristics. Combined the prospect theory and interval analysis, a new prospect theory based the modal choice modal is built. Considering that the travelers with different income and travel purpose ask for different service attributions, the "reference point" with interval number on the basis of the theory of reference frame is set up, and the benefit loss matrix is established. Using interval computing, the value function value is calculated, which is later used as utility of different travelers in the Logit mode. All the parameters are calibrated by Matlab programming. Using an example, the modal choice of urban residents is analyzed. The results show that the proposed method has a good forecasting performance.This thesis puts forward the way to modal choice model based on prospect theory, considering not only the uncertainty factors, but also the differences of people’s preference to different travel purpose, which is more realistic. Meanwhile this method can provide better decision-making basis for transportation policy makers, which has a good application prospect.