A Hierarchical Optimization Algorithm Applied to Large Scale Urban Transportation Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology developed for determination of optimal frequencies for urban bus network. The analytical model was created to represent the system behaviour: allocation of vehicles and passenger movements. The main requirement of optimization methods for this problem is the ability to handle system of high dimensionality with non-convex objective function. The methods described in the paper exploit the specific problem structure for the reduction of an optimization problem to a sequence of related but simpler and more easily solvable optimization problems.