A short-coming of the original TM1 that persists, to some degree, in TM2 is the representation of working from home. In TM1, there was no explicit representation of workers working from home. The procedure went as follows:
- Workers are generated in the synthetic population.
- Every worker is assigned a "usual work location".
- Each worker is assigned a daily activity pattern, either "mandatory", "non-mandatory", or "home".
- Workers assigned a "mandatory" pattern generate at least one work tour to their usual work location.
To simulate workers who worked full time at home (i.e., did not have a usual work place) as well as telecommuters, MTC manipulated the coordinated daily activity pattern model (CDAP) to increase, over time, the number of workers engaged in a "non-mandatory" or "home" pattern, therefore reducing the quantity of work travel. But the model treated those working from home full-time and those telecommuting in an identical manner as workers who stayed home due to an illness.
With TM1.6, MTC modified these procedures as follows:
- Workers are generated in the synthetic population.
- Every worker is assigned a "usual work location".
- A new model predicted whether a worker was likely to telecommute based on the mix of employment by industry at the work location.
- Each worker is assigned a daily activity pattern, either "mandatory", "non-mandatory", or "home". Workers who are predicted to telecommute in Step 3 are assigned either a "non-mandatory" or "home" pattern.
This approach had the following benefits:
- Telecommuters can be explicitly identified in the simulation results.
- Telecommuting is a function of employment industry.
TM2 is similar to TM1, with the notable addition of an explicit work from home model, which identifies simulated workers that never work outside the home. The steps in TM2 are therefore:
- Workers are generated in the synthetic population.
- Some number of workers are assigned to work from home, i.e., never travel to a usual work location outside the home.
- Workers not assigned to work from home in Step 2 are assigned a "usual work location".
- Each worker is assigned a daily activity pattern, either "mandatory", "non-mandatory", or "home".
- Workers assigned a "mandatory" pattern generate at least one work tour to their usual work location.
While this approach improves upon the TM1 formulation by explicitly identifying those who work only from home, it still treats telecommuters in an identical fashion as workers staying home due to illness.
For TM2.2, we will modify the Java code to combine the current TM2 approach with an improved version of the TM1.6 approach. The model steps will be as follows:
- Workers are generated in the synthetic population.
- Some number of workers are assigned to work from home, i.e., never travel to a usual work location outside the home.
- Workers not assigned to work from home in Step 2 are assigned a "usual work location".
- Each worker is assigned a daily activity pattern, either "mandatory", "non-mandatory", or "home".
- Each worker assigned a "mandatory" pattern will be assigned a telecommuting status in a new "explicit telecommute" model. This model will identify whether or not the worker is telecommuting on the simulation day and will be taken from the TM1.6 implementation.
- Explicit telecommuters, as identified in Step 5, will have their daily activity pattern updated to either "non-mandatory" or "home", based on a fixed probability distribution.
The advantages of this approach relative to TM2 are the same as in TM1.6, specifically:
- Telecommuters can be explicitly identified in the simulation results.
- Telecommuting is a function of employment industry.
The minor change in this approach relative to TM1.6 is that the explicit telecommuting model comes after CDAP, not before. We therefore benefit from the coordination across household members that CDAP provides in determining who will work on the simulation day. For workers subsequently identified as telecommuters by the explicit telecommuting model, the mandatory pattern is updated to reflect the lack of a work tour.
cc: @lmz, @gregerhardt, @FlaviaTsang, @AshishKuls, @vivverma9
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