Information consumes attention. In the information-rich society, a wealth of information can both support decision-making, but can also create poverty of attention and inability to make the best use of information. This paper applies the theory of rational inattention (RI) in modelling travellers' route choice behaviours and establishes the mathematical formulation of a generalized RI route choice model, where the attention (costs) to information is non-uniform. We prove that the optimal conditional route choice probabilities are always positive for all the candidates, and thus the existence of a closed-form expression of the optimal conditional choice probability. This choice behaviour removes a paradox exhibited in some of the existing works.
This talk introduces the general concepts of RI and information theory and existing works that applying RI in route choice modelling, before presenting our proposed generalized model, some of its theoretical properties and numerical illustrations.