Improving flex-route transit services with modular autonomous vehicles

Xiaohan Liu, Xiaobo Qu and Xiaolei Ma

Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2021, vol. 149, issue C

Abstract: With the advent of modular autonomous vehicles (MAVs), this paper presents a novel operational design for flex-route transit services to reduce operation costs of vehicles and improve the service quality of customers. The regime allows the simultaneous dispatch of a certain amount of MAVs from a bus terminal at a departure time. Each MAV is allowed to visit customers freely outside of checkpoints. Self-adaptive capacity and flexible service mode adapt time- and space-dependent demand characteristics. The presented operational design is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program that is NP-hard. A two-stage solution framework is developed to decompose the proposed mathematical programming cautiously. In the first stage, customized dynamic programming with valid cuts is designed to solve a bus scheduling problem efficiently. In the second stage, an effective and fast heuristic is proposed to solve a variant of the dial-a-ride problem and satisfy the technical requirements for developing on-line applications. Numerical examples and a case study show the effectiveness of the proposed design by comparing the flex-route transit services using traditional vehicles.

Keywords: Flex-route transit; Modular autonomous vehicle; Dynamic programming; On-line application (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tre.2021.102331

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