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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Feeder bus route design problem

Thesis/Dissertation ·
OSTI ID:6977912

The US transit industry is in a financial crisis, caused primarily by the rising operating cost and shrinking resources. Among the deficit-reducing strategies that have been proposed, a better integrated transit system has significant advantages in that it offers the possibility of simultaneously reducing cost and increasing revenue. This research develops an optimization-based methodology for the design of an integrated feeder bus/rail transit system. The proposed methodology includes two types of models, an analytic model and a network model. The study defines the Feeder Bus Route Design Problem (FBRDP) as that of locating bus routes and bus stops as well as determining the service characteristics of a feeder bus system, designed to access an existing rail system. The proposed analytic model provides approximate values for the optimal route density, operating headway and bus stop spacing. Within the network approach, the author considers demand with a single (many-to-one) and with multiple (many-to-many) destinations. The network optimization models for the FBRDP are routing-type models that cannot be solved exactly and need to be solved heuristically. A two-phase heuristic is developed that can be viewed as a generalization of the sequential-savings approach to vehicle routing.

Research Organization:
Maryland Univ., College Park (USA)
OSTI ID:
6977912
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English