An improved flower pollination algorithm to the urban transit routing problem

Abstract

The urban transit routing problem is NP-Hard, referring to the design of effective bus routes on the existing road networks. Current studies mainly focus on the models and the application of algorithms, and the improvements in the operation process in the algorithm such as the construction of initial solutions and the transformation methods are not investigated in detail. In order to optimize bus routes, the initial bus route set generation method, the local search, and the global search of the flower pollination algorithm were improved. Taking the average travel time of passengers and the proportion of the number of transfers as the optimization objective, an improved initial population generative method and an improved framework of flower pollination algorithm were applied to obtain a better set of bus routes. Finally, the effectiveness of the improved algorithm was verified based on some experimental results and compared to the previous bus networks such as Mandl’s Switzerland network.