Abstract
Traditional transit systems are usually composed of fixed routes and stops, which are suitable in densely populated areas. This paper presents a reformulation of the flexible transit model developed by Nourbakhsh and Ouyang (2012) to adapt it to many low demand cities in the world, especially those characterized by radial street patterns. Unlike traditional ones, buses of the proposed transit network are allowed to traverse in a predetermined service area and their precise trajectories hinge on the exact locations of passengers. To identify the optimal topology structure of the flexible transit system, continuous approximation approaches are developed to explore the optimal value of design parameters of the whole system, defining the optimal network layout through minimizing its objective function. To exhibit its advantages, numerical experiments are conducted to compare the flexible transit system with its two variants. The results show that the flexible transit system proposed in this paper outperforms the other two variants. The higher the access cost is, the more it would tilt towards the flexible transit system with a significant margin. Besides, the flexible transit system in a radial pattern competes more effectively than that in a grid structure. This is encouraging because the proposed transit system can be applied in a number of real-world cases.
Highlights
As a mode of collective transportation, public transit has been ourishing over the past few decades due to the severely congested tra c and polluted air condition in metropolitan cities
An improvement in transit network topology and operations management is the main element. is paper is concerned with the optimal design of a novel exible-route transit system that couples the hybrid structure and the exibility of the demand responsive service (DRS)
This paper proposes a novel exible transit system with buses traversing in their own designated “tubes”. rough analysis of all relevant agency costs and user costs, we utilize the continuous approximation approach with several variables to establish the optimal design problem as a mixed integer program, which derives a concise formulation and can be solved by an optimizer, such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) embedded in Matlab
Summary
As a mode of collective transportation, public transit has been ourishing over the past few decades due to the severely congested tra c and polluted air condition in metropolitan cities. Is paper is concerned with the optimal design of a novel exible-route transit system that couples the hybrid structure and the exibility of the demand responsive service (DRS). A novel exible transit system designed is adapted to cities where the travel demand density is relatively low. To the best of our knowledge, traditional transit system is usually composed of buses operating along xed routes and stopping at xed bus stops Such an operating mode tends to be more suitable for high travel demand density areas, such as many cities in Asian countries. E differences between the topology patterns necessitate the development of a different analytical model from the previously developed ones to determine the optimal design in a radial structure, which is what this paper intends to focus on.
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