Public transport fleet scheduling for minimizing total transfer waiting time

Abstract

Public transportation has been one of the most important research fields in the two last decades. The purpose of this paper is to create a schedule for public transport fleets such as buses and metro trains with the goal of minimizing the total transfer waiting time. We extend previous research works in the field of transit schedule with considering headways of each route as decision variables. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear programming model and solve it using ILOG CPLEX solver. For large-scale test instances, we develop a metaheuristic based on the scatter search algorithm to obtain good solutions in a reasonable CPU run times. Finally, in the computational section, the efficiency of the proposed model and developed algorithm are compared with the existing results in the literature on a real railway network.

Keywords

• Transportation
• scheduling
• scatter search metaheuristic.