User and Operator Perspectives in Public Transport Timetable Synchronization Design

Abstract

Increased traffic congestion and the adverse environmental effect of private cars have resulted in an increasingly pressing need for an integrated public transport (PT) system that is more attractive than private car use. The intelligent PT timetable synchronization design is one way to improve the integration and service quality of a PT system with increased connectivity, synchronization, and attractiveness toward far more user-oriented, system-optimal, smart, and sustainable travel. This paper proposes a new multicriteria optimization modeling framework with a systems approach for the PT timetable synchronization design problem. A new bi-objective model is proposed; it takes PT user and operator interests into account. The nature of the overall mathematical formulations of the new model is bi-objective nonlinear integer programming with linear constraints. On the basis of the characteristics of the model, a novel deficit function (DF)–based sequential search method is proposed to solve the problem so as to obtain Pareto-efficient solutions. The visual nature of the proposed DF and the two-dimensional fleet-cost space graphical techniques can facilitate the decision-making process of PT schedulers for finding a desired solution. Numerical results from a small PT network demonstrate that the proposed mathematical programming model and solution method are effective in practice and have the potential to be applied in large-scale and realistic networks.