The Single-Line Design Problem for Demand-Adaptive Transit Systems: A Modeling Framework and Decomposition Approach for the Stationary-Demand Case

Fausto Errico (), Teodor Gabriel Crainic (), Federico Malucelli () and Maddalena Nonato ()
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Fausto Errico: Département de genie de la construction, École de technologie supérieure, Montréal, Québec H3C 1K3, Canada; Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Réseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec H3T 1J4, Canada
Teodor Gabriel Crainic: Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Réseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec H3T 1J4, Canada; Département d’analytique, opérations et technologies de l’information, École des sciences de la gestion, Montréal, Québec H2X 3X2, Canada
Federico Malucelli: Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy
Maddalena Nonato: Facoltà di Ingegneria, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, 44124 Ferrara, Italy

Transportation Science, 2021, vol. 55, issue 6, 1300-1321

Abstract: When demand for transportation is low or sparse, traditional transit cannot provide efficient and good-quality service, because of its fixed structure. For this reason, mass transit is evolving toward some degree of flexibility. Although the extension of Dial-a-Ride systems to general public meets such need of adaptability, it presents several drawbacks mostly related to the their extreme flexibility. Consequently, new transportation alternatives, such as demand-adaptive systems (DASs), combining characteristics from both the traditional transit and Dial-a-Ride, have been introduced. For their twofold nature, DASs require careful planning. We focus on tactical aspects of the planning process by formalizing the single-line DAS design problem with stationary demand and proposing two alternative hierarchical decomposition approaches for its solution. The main motivation behind this work is to provide a general methodology suitable to be used as a tool to build the tactical DAS plan in real-life conditions. We provide an experimental study where the two proposed decomposition methods are compared and the general behavior of the systems is analyzed when altering some design parameters. Furthermore, we test the versatility of our methods on a variety of situation that may be encountered in real-life conditions.

Keywords: public transit; semiflexible systems; demand-adaptive systems; tactical planning; service and schedule line design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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