Managerial decisions to recover from Covid-19 disruption: A multi-objective optimization approach applied to public transport operators

Abstract

The resilience of transport systems, facing natural or man-made disruptions, has been widely discussed in literature in terms of recovery capabilities concerning infrastructures, suggesting solutions to provide users an acceptable level of service along the interrupted network. However, in the context of the Covid-19 outbreak, the disruption has stressed the resilience of transport systems not on the supply side but rather at organizational level for transport service providers. Indeed, the sudden and drastic decrease in users due to the restrictions imposed by governments to limit the pandemic spread has implicated severe economic consequences in the running of transport companies. In this paper, attention has been focused on the public transport sector to analyse the effects of different initiatives, which companies could undertake in response to the demand shock caused by the Covid-19 emergency. Notably, an optimization procedure has been developed with the aim of determining feasible Pareto-front solutions, which correspond to trade-off conditions for the concurrent maximization of the company profit and the minimization of outsourcing services. The time span necessary to implement the examined recovery measures has been considered together with the limitation to appropriate threshold values for the main cost and income items influencing the company operations management. The proposed approach has been applied to the case study of an Italian public transport company to appraise different post-Covid-19 resilience strategies.