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.
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.