Customised bus route design with passenger-to-station assignment optimisation

Abstract

As an emerging and innovative public transportation mode, the customised bus (CB) has drawn widespread attention. Existing studies of the CB mainly focus on issues regarding the bus station location, route design, timetabling, and fare setting, but rarely consider the passenger to bus station assignment problem which can significantly influence passengers’ benefit and the buses’ operating scheme. Thus, this study focuses on the customised bus routing problem with passenger-to-station assignment (CBRP-PSA) aiming to simultaneously minimise passengers’ CB service access cost and the bus route cost. A time-discretized multi-commodity network flow model is developed to jointly determine the CB routes, timetables, and passenger-to-station assignment by allowing split loads and mixed loads. Through the dualization, the developed model is decomposed into two solvable sub-problems, and a Lagrangian-based heuristic solution algorithm is proposed. The model and algorithm are implemented in illustrative, medium-scale, and large-scale transportation networks to demonstrate their effectiveness under different scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Customised bus
• vehicle routing problem
• passenger-to-station assignment
• split load
• Lagrangian relaxation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72288101] and National Ten Thousand Talent Program [grant number T19B600010].