Shuttle Planning for Link Closures in Urban Public Transport Networks

Evelien van der Hurk (), Haris N. Koutsopoulos (), Nigel Wilson (), Leo G. Kroon () and Gábor Maróti ()
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Evelien van der Hurk: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Department of Transport, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Haris N. Koutsopoulos: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Nigel Wilson: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Leo G. Kroon: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3000 DR Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Netherlands Railways, 3511 ER Utrecht, Netherlands
Gábor Maróti: VU University Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Netherlands Railways, 3511 ER Utrecht, Netherlands

Transportation Science, 2016, vol. 50, issue 3, 947-965

Abstract: Urban public transport systems must periodically close certain links for maintenance, which can have significant effects on the service provided to passengers. In practice, the effects of closures are mitigated by replacing the closed links with a simple shuttle service. However, alternative shuttle services could reduce inconvenience at a lower operating cost. This paper proposes a model to select shuttle lines and frequencies under budget constraints. We propose a new formulation that allows a minimal frequency restriction on any line that is operated and minimizes passenger inconvenience cost, which includes transfers and frequency-dependent waiting time costs. This model is applied to a shuttle design problem based on a real-world case study of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority network of Boston, Massachusetts. The results show that additional shuttle routes can reduce passenger delay compared to the standard industry practice, while also distributing delay more equally over passengers, at the same operating budget. The results are robust under different assumptions about passenger route choice behavior. Computational experiments show that the proposed formulation, coupled with a preprocessing step, can be solved faster than prior formulations.

Keywords: shuttle planning; disruption management; line planning; public transport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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