Optimal Excess Commuting Evaluation Based on Local Minimal Costs

Abstract

Excess commuting refers to the value of unnecessary commuting or distance costs. Traditional commuting distance models adapt the most efficient scenario with people working in the nearest workplace geographically. Even though there have been some attempts to include constraints with commuter attributes and neighborhood features, problems arise with traditional geographical space and the subjectivity of these predefined characteristics. In this paper, we propose a method to calculate theoretical local minimal costs, which considers preferences that are inherently behavioral based on current work–home trips in the process of reassigning the work–home configuration. Our method is based on a feature space with a higher dimension and with the enlargement of attributes and relations of and between commuters and neighborhoods. Additionally, our solution is arrived at innovatively by improved Fuzzy C-Means clustering and linear programming. Unlike traditional clustering algorithms, our improved method adapts entropy information and selects the initial parameters based on the actual data rather than on prior knowledge. Using the real origin–destination matrix, theoretical minimal costs are calculated within each cluster, referred to as local minimal costs, and the average sum of local minimal costs is our theoretical minimal cost. The difference between the expected minimal cost and the actual cost is the excess commuting. Using our method, experimental results show that only 13% of the daily commuting distance in Wuhan could be avoided, and the theoretical distance is approximately 1.06 km shorter than the actual commuting distance.