Effects of Air Quality on Housing Location: A Predictive Dynamic Continuum User-Optimal Approach

Recent decades have seen increasing concerns regarding air quality in housing locations. This study proposes a predictive continuum dynamic user-optimal model with combined choice of housing location, destination, route, and departure time. A traveler’s choice of housing location is modeled by a logit-type demand distribution function based on air quality, housing rent, and perceived travel costs. Air quality, or air pollutants, within the modeling region are governed by the vehicle-emission model and the advection-diffusion equation for dispersion. In this study, the housing-location problem is formulated as a fixed-point problem and the predictive continuum dynamic user-optimal model with departure-time consideration is formulated as a variational inequality problem. The Lax-Friedrichs scheme, the fast-sweeping method, the Goldstein-Levitin-Polyak projection algorithm, and self-adaptive successive averages are adopted to discretize and solve these problems. A numerical example is given to demonstrate the characteristics of the proposed housing-location choice problem with consideration of air quality and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution algorithms.