CB-Planner: A bus line planning framework for customized bus systems

A customized bus (CB) system is an emerging public transportation that aims to provide direct and efficient transit services for groups of commuters with similar travel demands. Existing CB systems aggregate similar travel demands and plan bus lines manually, which is inefficient and costly. In this paper, the authors propose a CB line planning framework called CB-Planner, which is applicable to multiple travel data sources. A mathematical programming formulation is proposed to simultaneously optimize bus stop locations, bus routes, timetables and passengers’ probabilities of choosing CB. The authors then developed a heuristic solution framework that includes a grid-density based clustering method for discovering potential travel demands efficiently, a bus stop deployment algorithm to minimize the number of stops and walking distance, and dynamic programming based routing and timetabling algorithms for maximizing estimated profit. The authors' conduct an experiment on a small-scale network to verify the performance gap between the optimal solution and their proposed heuristic solution. A case study is then conducted on one-month taxi trajectory data in Nanjing, China. The study demonstrates that CB lines generated by the authors' CB-Planner can achieve higher profit compared with baseline methods, and they also provide efficient transit services with short walk distances and small departure time adjustments. The moderate increase in travel time is paid off by the significant savings in travel fare.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2019.02.006
• Record URL:
  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X18305126
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/0968090X
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract reprinted with permission of Elsevier.
• Authors:
  • Lyu, Yan
  • Chow, Chi-Yin
  • Lee, Victor C S
  • Ng, Joseph K Y
  • Li, Yanhua
  • Zeng, Jia
• Publication Date: 2019-4

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 233-253
• Serial:
  • Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies
  • Volume: 101
  • Issue Number: 0
  • Publisher: Elsevier
  • ISSN: 0968-090X
  • Serial URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus lines; Bus routes; Bus stops; Case studies; Demand responsive transportation; Location; Programming (Mathematics); Taxicabs; Timetables; Trajectory
• Geographic Terms: Nanjing (China)
• Subject Areas: Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01700038
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 29 2019 10:15AM