Carrier Selection in a Passenger Transport System Based on Network Reliability under Time Constraint

Abstract

Managers who work in the tourism sector always let satisfying customers' demand be the priority and selecting carrier selection in their passenger transport system is a crucial process. Network reliability is always utilized as a performance index. This study provides a method to identify the ideal carriers according to the relevant network reliability. The network reliability is defined as the probability that a given demand can travel from an origin to a destination within a time limitation. A passenger transport system can be constructed as a flow-network with nodes and arcs linking passengers from the origin (source) to the destination (sink), where each node is a station and each arc represents a bus, a train or a flight connecting two nodes on schedule. Since the contracted carrier of each arc may provide the service to several agents, the capacity of each arc is regarding stochastic with a specific probability. Any flow-network associated with a stochastic capacity is thus a typical stochastic-flow network. This work proposes an algorithm including: evaluate the network reliability under a time constraint of a stochastic-flow passenger transport network, and then employ it as a basis for carrier selection. A case study is also used to demonstrate the selection procedure.