Customized bus service design for uncertain commuting travel demand

Abstract

This study proposes an interesting customized bus service design problem by considering travel demand uncertainty. Given a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is put forward for the complex decision making on bus routing, timetabling and bus deployment, with the objective of generating a set of profitable bus services to cater for diverse commuting-trip requests. To capture the risk-averse level of the bus operator in uncertain travel demand environment, a random variable describing the likelihood that the offered bus services are rejected by potential passengers and two associated control parameters are embedded in the MILP model, facilitating an adjustable robust optimization framework. A branch-and-price method is implemented to solve the model exactly. A column-generation-based heuristic method is proposed to solve large-scale problems. The effectiveness of both the exact and heuristic methods is assessed in numerical experiments.

KEYWORDS:

• bus route
• bus timetable
• bus deployment
• demand uncertainty
• risk-averse level
• branch and price
• heuristic algorithm

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the research project ‘Public Transit Bus & Driver Scheduling' (WBS No. R-302-000-172-114) from the Ministry of Education Singapore. In addition, the first author acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52002008), and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. L201008).

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by the research project Public Transit Bus & Driver Scheduling from the Ministry of Education Singapore [grant number WBS No. R-302-000-172-114]. In addition, the first author acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 52002008], and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation [grant number L201008].