Abstract
This paper presents a mixed-integer linear programming model for demand-responsive feeder transit services to assign vehicles located at different depots to pick up passengers at the demand points and transport them to the rail station. The proposed model features passengers’ one or several preferred time windows for boarding vehicles at the demand point and their expected ride time. Moreover, passenger satisfaction that was related only to expected ride time is fully accounted for in the model. The objective is to simultaneously minimize the operation costs of total mileage and maximize passenger satisfaction. As the problem is an extension of the nondeterministic polynomial problem with integration of the vehicle route problem, this study further develops an improved bat algorithm to yield meta-optimal solutions for the model in a reasonable amount of time. When this was applied to a case study in Nanjing City, China, the mileage and satisfaction of the proposed model were reduced by 1.4 km and increased by 7.1%, respectively, compared with the traditional model. Sensitivity analyses were also performed to investigate the impact of the number of designed bus routes and weights of objective functions on the model performance. Finally, a comparison of Cplex, standard bat algorithm, and group search optimizer is analyzed to verify the validity of the proposed algorithm.
Highlights
The first/last mile access to major fixed-route transit networks and connectivity of residential areas is one of the main challenges faced by public transit
DRTs are an extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and the pickup and delivery problem (PDP) with time windows [3]
This paper presents a novel optimization methodology for DRT with multiple time windows to reveal the relationship between the total mileage and passenger satisfaction
Summary
The first/last mile access to major fixed-route transit networks and connectivity of residential areas is one of the main challenges faced by public transit. DRTs provide increased flexibility, lower operation costs, and a higher service level compared with FRTs, especially within low-density residential areas. DRTs are an extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and the pickup and delivery problem (PDP) with time windows [3]. This aims to assign routes in order to visit demand points and transport passengers to the rail station, where passengers can acquire travel information through a phone app. The existing DRTs assume that passengers travel only in a single period of time and neglect that passengers sometimes provide multiple time windows, with the vehicle required to arrive at the designated place within one of the specified periods to pick them up. DRTs with expected ride time have not been examined previously
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