Determining the Direction for Rapid Transportation by Maximum Cover Method: Case Study in Sydney, Australia

Abstract

Routing for public rapid transportation is defined as determining the optimized location or position of stations and direction of route in a city. This problem can be solved as an optimization problem with target function of maximizing the cover of stations and distance of stations and length of direction as constraints. At the other hand, researchers have interested by heuristic or explorative methods due to their simplicity and fast performance in solving various problems. In the current paper, an heuristic method is represented for step by step developing of direction based on maximizing the criterion of population covered by stations and accessibility to important urban locations so that it is expected that the trip cover of direction – as target function – is maximized. The solving method is originated from two previous methods of population cover and trip cover. The population cover, trip attraction, diametric direction and length of direction are used as criteria. The proposed method is used in network of Sydney as case study. 20 answer directions with selected departure point are constituted by this method and two previous ones and the trip cover and their population are calculated and identified by comparing the results. The trip covers of directions in new method are increased compared to two previous methods. The maximum trip cover produced by one of the directions proposed by new method and by trip cover method is 58869 and 46962 trip, respectively. Comparing the new method and population cover method is showed that the population covered by the proposed method is 21.4% lower than the original method and the trip cover is 3.3 times greater than the original method. The answers of the proposed method have more trip cover than the maximum cover trip method as about 16.5%. For more precise concluding, a comparison is made between directions with same trend proposed by the presented method and the maximum trip cover method and it shows that for each of 4 same trend directions, trip cover is increased between 12 and 67%.