With the ever increasing number of opportunities, in every aspect of
modem life, making choices becomes part of our daily routine. It is thus
only natural that social scientists have started to study human choice
behavior. Early efforts focused on modeling aggregate choice patterns of
home buyers, shoppers, travelers, and others. Later studies, aiming to
achieve more realistic results, have concentrated on simula- ting
disaggregate behavior. The most recent approach in choice research is
the so-called Discrete Choice Modeling. It is a front-line area mainly
in contemporary transportation, geography, and behavioral research. It
focuses on individuals' decision-making processes regarding the choice
of destinations, modes, departure times, and routes. Considerable
research has been done on identifying and quantify- ing the general
rules governing the individuals' choice behavior, but to the best of our
knowledge there is no single book that solely deals with route choice.
The study of travelers' route choice in networks is primarily oriented
towards gaining insight into their spatial choice behavior. How do
people choose routes in a network, what do they know, what do they look
for, which road characteristics playa role? On the basis of this
information it is possible to design quantitative models aimed at
predicting the use of routes dependent on the characteristics of the
routes, those of the surrounding environment, and those of the
travelers. In this way, traffic flows in the network can be calculated
and the network performance can be evaluated.