Abstract
This article addresses timetable synchronization in public transportation, an important problem in modern smart cities, in order to guarantee a proper quality of service to citizens. Two variants of the bus timetabling synchronization problem considering extended transfer zones are studied: optimizing offsets and optimizing offsets and headways for each line. An exact mixed integer programming and an evolutionary algorithm are developed to solve both problem variants. The algorithms are evaluated on 45 instances of a real case study, the intelligent transportation system of Montevideo, Uruguay. Experimental results reported significant improvements over the current timetable implemented by the city administration. The number of successful synchronizations improved up to 66.6% and 179.9% for the first and second problem variant, respectively. The average waiting times for transfers improved, especially in tight problem instances (up to 57.8% and 158.3% for the first and second problem variant, respectively). The proposed planning methods are useful to help decision makers to configure public transportation systems.
Highlights
Public transportation is a key service in smart cities, allowing for efficient and low pollution mobility for citizens and reducing the dependency on cars and other motorized transportation modes [1,2]
The comparative analysis of evolutionary algorithm (EA) and the exact solutions indicates that the evolutionary approach demonstrated to be highly efficient at solving the problem: on average, the distance to the exact solution was below 1.32%
Normalized average waiting time results are reported for the baseline real solution, the EA solution for bus synchronization problem (BSP) variant #1 (α = 0.0), and the exact solution for BSP variant #2 (α = 0.3)
Summary
Public transportation is a key service in smart cities, allowing for efficient and low pollution mobility for citizens and reducing the dependency on cars and other motorized transportation modes [1,2]. Designing and operating an efficient public transportation system requires solving several relevant problems, including the proper design and management of routes, timetabling, and planning of buses and drivers, to provide a good quality of service to citizens [3] and to promote sustainability [4]. The timetable synchronization problem consists of crafting a timetable that optimizes transfers between lines in a public transportation system. Timetable synchronization has been recognized as one of the most difficult problems for public transportation planning and optimization [5]. The problem has been often addressed intuitively, assuming that experienced operators are able to define headways, i.e., the time between consecutive departures of buses in a line to provide a proper quality of service. This work proposes combinatorial optimization approaches to state the problem and the use of optimization techniques to solve real-world instances
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