Demand Responsive Service-based Optimization on Flexible Routes and Departure Time of Community Shuttles
Jie Xiong, Biao Chen, Xiangnan Li, Zhengbing He, Yanyan Chen
Abstract
This paper investigates the optimal routing design problem of a community shuttle system feeding to metro stations based on demand-responsive service. The solution aims to jointly optimize a set of customized routes and the departure time of each route to provide a flexible shuttle service. Considering a set of on-demand trip requests between bus stops and metro stations, a mixed-integer optimization model is formulated to minimize the total system cost, including the operation cost and passenger’s in-vehicle cost, subject to the constraints on the route length, time window, detours, and vehicle capacity. To solve the problem, two metaheuristic algorithms, i.e. a tabu search (TS) and a variable neighborhood search (VNS), with different internal operators are specifically designed. A case study based on a realistic network is conducted to test the model and the solution, and comparisons of the performance of different algorithms are investigated.