Designing a transit priority network under variable demand

ABSTRACT

While transit exclusive lanes are statically introduced for an entire day (or for the peak period), the total number and distribution of trips vary from one hour to another during a day. In this study, a Transit Priority Network Design Problem (TPNDP) under variable demand has been formulated by a bi-level robust optimization approach. At the upper level, a non-linear mathematical program is adapted to find the optimum set of exclusive bus lanes at the network level such that the total travel time as well as its hourly variation is minimized and at the lower level, a four-step demand model is applied. The results show the importance of considering the hourly travel demand variation in designing a transit priority scheme and how such results can be compared with previous TPNDP models with a fixed demand. The proposed algorithm identifies the location of full time and part-time transit lanes in the network.

KEYWORDS:

• Exclusive bus lane
• transit priority network design
• robust optimization
• ant colony algorithm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.