Zonal-based flexible bus service under elastic stochastic demand

Authors

Enoch Lee
Xuekai Cen
Hong K. Lo

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2021

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, planning - route design, planning - service quality, ridership - demand, ridership - elasticity, mode - bus, mode - demand responsive transit, operations - reliability

Keywords

Flexible bus, Stochastic optimization, Elastic demand, Demand responsive transit

Abstract

This study investigates flexible bus that provides door-to-door service with multiple passengers sharing the vehicle, which reduces congestion on the urban network. The service area is divided into zones, and flexible buses are assigned to zonal routes based on the historical demand characteristics before demand realization. Passengers are served by either regular service or ad hoc service after the demand realization to minimize the sum of ad hoc service cost and detour time cost. The elastic and stochastic natures of demand are captured in the formulation by the volume stochasticity of demand, detour time stochasticity, and elasticity of demand with respect to the flexible bus service price and quality. The profit of the flexible bus service is maximized while accounting for the detour time cost. To effectively solve the problem, volume and detour time reliability measures are introduced to separate the problem into a vehicle-to-route assignment problem and a passenger-to-vehicle assignment problem. A gradient-based solution approach is devised to determine the flexible bus routing plans by optimizing the associated reliability measures. The solution approach is further improved by combining the gradient-based approach with a greedy search solution approach and relaxing the formulations. The formulation and solution approaches are implemented using real data in Chengdu, China, with promising results.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part E Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13665545

Recommended Citation

Lee, E., Cen, X., & Lo, H.K. (2021). Zonal-based flexible bus service under elastic stochastic demand. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Vol. 152, 102367.