Reducing passengers’ travel time by optimising stopping patterns in a large-scale network: A case-study in the Copenhagen Region

Jens Parbo, Otto A. Nielsen and Carlo G. Prato

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2018, vol. 113, issue C, 197-212

Abstract: Optimising stopping patterns in railway schedules is a cost-effective way to reduce passengers’ generalised travel costs without increasing train operators’ costs. The challenge consists in striking a balance between an increase in waiting time for passengers at skipped stations and a decrease in travel time for through-going passengers, with possible consequent changes in the passenger demand and route choices. This study presents the formulation of the skip-stop problem as a bi-level optimisation problem where the lower level is a schedule-based transit assignment model that delivers passengers’ route choices to the skip-stop optimisation model at the upper level, and where the upper level in return provides an improved timetable to the lower level. A heuristic method for large-scale urban networks is presented to solve this extremely complex bi-level problem, where the skip-stop optimisation is a mixed-integer problem, whereas the route choice model is a non-linear non-continuous mapping of the timetable. The method was tested on the suburban railway network in the Greater Copenhagen Region (Denmark): the reduction in railway passengers’ in-vehicle travel time was 5.5%, the reduction in passengers’ generalised travel cost was 3.2% and, at the system level, the yearly consumer surplus amounted at 76.7 million DKK (about 10.3 million EUR or 12.7 million USD) when compared to the existing stopping patterns.

Keywords: Public transport passengers’ behaviour; Stopping patterns; Public transport optimisation; Railway timetabling; Large-scale networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856416310667
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:113:y:2018:i:c:p:197-212

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2018.04.012

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().