Planning of Campus Area Nighttime Public Transportation System Based on GIS and Operation Research

In College Station style suburban areas, students usually prefer to take buses back to their off campus apartments after their on campus studies in the night time. However, such student-formed passengers' demands on night school buses are not always perfectly met. In this paper, the bi-level optimization algorithms are proposed to optimize possible night bus routes with the ArcGIS software as a platform of simulation. The objective function is to maximize the number of students served with the constraint of reasonable budget. The first level of optimization is to locate as many bus stops as possible to benefit more students, while the second level is to shorten the total route distance to save time and number of bus stops and reduce the construction, maintenance, and operation costs. There could be iterations running between these two levels the objective functions are not satisfied. The AMPL controlled ILOG CPLEX is utilized to solve the optimization problems, including the hybrid of simplex algorithm and branch and bound algorithm, min-max algorithm, P-center algorithm, and integer programming. City of College Station where The Texas A&M University is located is selected as a test bed showing how the night bus routes were planned and optimized. The demands of night school buses and possible locations are initialized based on the surveys to students, covering libraries and off campus apartment communities. The detailed routes and schedules of the optimal night school buses are finally presented.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP050 Standing Committee on Bus Transit Systems.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Du, Jianbang
  • Qiao, Fengxiang
  • Yu, Lei
  • Gao, Lu
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus routes; Bus transit; Campus transportation; Geographic information systems; Night; Optimization; Transportation planning; Travel demand
• Geographic Terms: College Station (Texas)
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01626918
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-04008
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 27 2017 9:27AM