A Decision-Making Model For Determining The Service Area Of A Flexible-route Bus

When the density of demands is low and sparse, the performance of traditional fixed-route community transport is not good, which is accompanied with idle running and long waiting time of passengers, as well as unnecessary carbon emission. Under this situation, the flexible-route bus attracted the attention of the bus operators and researchers, which allows the bus to deviate from the fixed route in a specific service area to pick up occasional customers.The aims of the implementation of flexible-route bus are to achieve the favorable tradeoffs between high-quality customer service and high-efficiency bus operation. Because of the negative impact caused by disruptions of new demands on the system performance, the significant challenge is how to balance the tradeoffs between the new passengers' benefits, the already-scheduled passengers' convenience and the operational cost when inserting a stop to the current route. In this paper, a decision-making model for determining the service area of the flexible-route bus is presented. A utility function is introduced to estimate the marginal utility, aiming to determine the service area for the flexible-route bus, which allows the bus to deviate from the fixed route in a specific service area to pick up occasional customers. This research includes the following aspects.(1) The critical elements which determine the service area are analyzed. The service area, namely the geographic region that the flexible route bus should cover in its one time of travel, is very important. The critical elements which make the service area differ from zone to zone are abstracted and analyzed. Then, these critical factors are use to model the service area.(2) The decision-making model for determining the service area of flexible-route bus is proposed. In this model, a utility function is introduced to estimate the marginal utility. Aiming to maximize the utility of the whole system, the feasible service area is given. The utility function consists of two types of components, passenger times and vehicle mileage. According to the evaluation of the value of time, the passengers' utility is measured. The proposed modeling approach considers the measure of utility. In order to unify the passenger times and vehicle mileage, the total utility is evaluated in terms of money equivalent. (3) Finally, computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Numerical experiments are conducted according to a real-world problem of an industrial zone in Dalian, China to test the proposed model. The service area works as a guideline for the bus driver in the online scheduling process. Conducting a simulation with this model will help decision-makers of this sector have better understanding of the possible impacts and the performance of the service.In the research, a flexible-route bus is proposed as an attractive mode of transport for the low-density area. A decision-making model is developed for determining the service area of flexible-route bus. The model can provide a new way to solve the vehicle routing and scheduling. This problem is also applied to a variety of cases in which community transport is involved, such as school campus, tourist spot like Exposition Park, and residential areas with low and sparse demands.