A demand-responsive feeder service with a maximum headway at mandatory stops

Bryan David Galarza Montenegro, Kenneth Sörensen and Pieter Vansteenwegen

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

Abstract: Public transportation out of suburban or rural areas is crucial. Feeder transportation services offer a solution by transporting passengers to areas where more options for public transport are available. On one hand, fully flexible demand-responsive feeder services efficiently tailor their service to the needs of the passengers. On the other hand, traditional feeder services provide predictability and easier cost control. In this paper, a semi-flexible demand-responsive feeder service is considered, which combines positive characteristics of both traditional services as well as fully flexible services. This feeder service has two types of bus stops: mandatory bus stops and optional bus stops. Mandatory bus stops are guaranteed to be visited by a bus within a certain time interval. Optional stops are only visited when there is demand for transportation nearby. The performance of this feeder service is optimized with the use of a heuristic that combines elements of different metaheuristic frameworks. Experimental results on small benchmark instances indicate that the heuristic performs on average 12.42% better than LocalSolver, a commercial optimization solver, with an average runtime of 2.1s. Larger instances can also be solved, typically within two minutes.

Keywords: Meta-heuristics; Public bus transport; Feeder service; Demand-responsive transportation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ant:wpaper:2023001

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