The on-demand bus routing problem with real-time traffic information

Ying Lian, Flavien Lucas and Kenneth Sörensen

Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics

Abstract: We propose to solve a real-time traffic variation of the On-Demand Bus Routing Problem (ODBRP) introduced by Melis and Sörensen (2021). The ODBRP belongs to the category of dial-a-ride problems (DARP), and features departure and arrival bus station selection. This problem is specifically aimed at planning a fleet of on-demand buses in an urban environment. However, cities are frequently plagued by traffic congestion, which may cause delays and missed time windows for passengers. To deal with this situation, we introduce, study, and solve a variant of the ODBRP in which travel times are both time-dependent (i.e., the travel time between two nodes depends on the departure time) and updated dynamically. In our approach, congested roads that might cause passenger delays are modeled by frequently updating the travel speed on the road segments that constitute them. The resulting problem is solved by using a K-shortest paths procedure to determine alternative paths between bus stations combined with a variable neighborhood search procedure to repair violated time windows. Our experimental results show the overall effectiveness of this real-time control under different degrees of flexibility (congestion and number of buses available). Specifically, the average tardiness, maximum tardiness, and number of late passengers are significantly reduced under a wide range of congestion scenarios, from slight to severe. In addition, this effectiveness holds for various ratios of requests to the number of vehicles.

Keywords: On-demand bus; Real-time traffic information; Dynamic travel speed; Real-time control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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