Reliability-based equitable transit frequency design

Abstract

Fairness is an important criterion for achieving sustainable urban development. While most existing studies focus on accessing or evaluating the fairness condition of a given transit network, this study explicitly incorporates fairness as an objective in the planning step. A multi-objective bilevel programming model is developed where the lower level problem is the reliability-based transit assignment problem and the upper level problem is to determine optimal frequency settings to simultaneously minimise the total effective travel cost and maximise the network fairness condition. A multi-objective Artificial Bee Colony algorithm is developed to solve the bilevel model. Numerical studies find that: (1) increasing the frequency may not improve the fairness condition; (2) there is a tradeoff between the two objectives (3) the effect of passengers’ risk aversion attitude on the fairness measurement depends on the frequency setting; it could either amplify the fairness measurements or have no impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Reliability-based transit assignment
• transit frequency setting
• transport equity
• artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm
• multiobjective bilevel optimisation

Acknowledgements

The author thanks four anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and constructive comments for improving the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this study, route-section, section, and link are used interchangeably.

Additional information

Funding

The opinions expressed in this paper reflect the author’s own views. This research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Project numbers 71971038 and 71701030].