Habit formation and affective responses in location choice dynamics

This paper discusses the development of a dynamic agent-based model which simulates how agents search and explore in non-stationary environments and ultimately develop habitual, context-dependent, activity-travel patterns. In this paper, we specifically focus on how emotional values, beliefs and aspirations can be incorporated in these models. Next, through an illustrative case study, we will show how these can be integrated in an agent-based micro-simulation to model dynamic decision making under uncertainty and illustrate that people try to avoid higher uncertainty in their location choice. Simulations indicate that solutions generated by the model are sensitive to rational and emotional considerations in decision making in well-interpretable ways. Our approach is scalable in the sense that it is applicable to study areas of large size (e.g., region wide)