Optimal integrated location and dispatching decisions for feeder bus route design problem

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Dispatch centres are an important part of the feeder bus network, and their location affects the design process of the feeder route. In some remote areas with weak transport infrastructure, it is very important to find an effective tool to simultaneously select the optimal location of the dispatch centre as well as transit routing process, which could improve the performance of the feeder bus system. The purpose of this article is to present an integrated optimization model for joint location and dispatching decisions for Feeder Bus Route Design (FBRD). The proposed methodology can select a number of best dispatch centres in alternative sets and calculate the order of the demand points visited by the feeder route. The objective of the model is to simultaneously minimize the total construction cost of selected dispatch centres and the total operational cost of the designed feeder bus system. The methodology facilitates obtaining solutions using the design of an improved double population Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) algorithm. For example, it redefines the solution coding and the heuristic used to randomly initialize the initial population. When applied to the design of a feeder bus system for a station at Nanjing (China), the results reveal that a reduced budget may lead to change in the location of the dispatch centre; a more distant centre is required, which may increase the total mileage cost of all feeder routes. A detailed comparison of the improved and standard BFO and CPLEX shows that the difference between solutions is acceptable. However, the calculation time is greatly reduced, thus proving the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.