A Two-phase Customized Bus Service Network Design And Optimization Method Considering Passenger Travel Choice Behavior

With the rapid urbanization process,road capacity and traffic infrastructure cannot satisfy the increasing traffic demand,which lead to increasingly severe traffic congestion problem.After years of exploration,it is found that building a high-quality and multi-level public transport system with reasonable resources allocation strategy is the best and essential solution to ease the pressure of transportation system in urban areas.As an emerging public transport mode in recent years,the customized bus(CB)service has both the intensive characteristics of high capacity,environmental-friendly,and can satisfy the passengers’ personalized travel demand.The service mode of CB is between conventional bus service and taxi service and it is an important supplement to urban public transit system.Therefore,systematically organization of the key features of CB,analysis and modeling of the influence factors of passengers’ mode choice behavior,and building the optimization methods for the CB network design problem to increase the efficiency of CB service is vital with regard to both theory and practice use.This thesis firstly summarizes the current development of CB service in the world and elaborates the main operation mode and characteristics.Then CB service is compared with several other travel modes including conventional bus service and the feasibility and necessity to develop CB service is stated.Secondly,stated preference(SP)investigation is conducted to collect the citizens’ travel data for analyzing the influence of socioeconomic attributes and travel mode characteristics to the CB mode choice behavior and modelling the choice behavior using double-layer nested logit model.Thirdly,this study proposes a two-phase planning and optimization mechanism for the CB network design problem on the basis of current state of the art methods.This new method is composed of two phases which contains a dynamic phase of updating the network and a static phase of optimizing the current network.The new two-phase mechanism not only satisfy the passengers’ demand and the operator’s avenue,but also considers the influence of passengers’ travel choice to the route generating,which can better match the operation of CB service.The main contributions of this study are as follows:(1)the core characteristics and advantages of CB service are refined based on a comprehensive summary of the research and development of CB service;(2)analysis of the key influencing factors of choice behavior involving CB service and modeling the choice behavior based on double-layer nested logit model;(3)proposing a new two-phase mechanism that both satisfy the passengers’ demand and the operator’s avenue;(4)modeling of the dynamic interaction between operator and the passengers,and apply the passenger choice model in the design and optimization of CB network.