A rational approach to handling fuzzy perceptions in route choice

The purpose of this paper is to develop a heuristic way for handling fuzzy perceptions in explaining route choice behavior from behavioral point of view. A hybrid model where route choice decision making is described in a hierarchy uses concepts from fuzzy logic and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed for making possible a more proper description of route choice behavior in transportation systems. Teodorovic and Kikuchi's fuzzy ‘if-then’ rules are adopted to represent a typical driver's psychology for capturing essential preferences, pairwise, among alternatives that a driver may consider. The AHP is then incorporated in this model to capture the imaginary psychological process that represents underlying observable behavior to estimate drivers' preference allotment among the alternatives. This new procedure is applied in a real world sample based on stated values of subjects. Findings show that this method provides intuitively and statistically promising results.