Optimizing Bus Bridging Services in Response to Disruptions of Urban Transit Rail Networks

With growing dependence of many cities on urban mass transit, even limited disruptions of public transportation networks can lead to widespread confusion and significant productivity losses. A need exists for systematic approaches to developing efficient responses to minimize such negative impacts. The authors present an optimization-based approach that responds to degradations of urban transit rail networks by introducing smartly designed bus bridging services that take into consideration commuter travel demand at the time of the disruption. The approach consists of three fundamental steps, namely, (1) a column generation procedure to dynamically generate demand-responsive candidate bus routes, (2) a path-based multicommodity network flow model to identify the most effective combination of these candidate bus routes, and (3) another optimization-based procedure to determine simultaneously the optimal allocation of available vehicle resources among the selected routes and corresponding headways. The approach is applied to two case studies defined using actual data. The results show that the proposed approach can be carried out efficiently and that adding nonintuitive bus routes to the standard bus bridging services can significantly reduce the average travel delay. Moreover, the approach distributes delay more equitably. Many realistic operating constraints can also be handled.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2014.0577
• Record URL:
  http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/trsc.2014.0577
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1767714
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstracts reprinted with permission of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, http://www.informs.org).
• Authors:
  • Jin, Jian Gang
  • Teo, Kwong Meng
  • Odoni, Amedeo R
• Publication Date: 2016-8

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 790-804
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 50
  • Issue Number: 3
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus routes; Demand responsive transportation; Optimization; Public transit; Railroad commuter service; Service disruption; Travel demand; Urban transit
• Subject Areas: Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01631002
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 28 2017 5:09PM