Design of integrated limited-stop and short-turn services for a bus route (Q1793585)

Summary: As a major choice for daily travel, public transit plays an important role in transporting passengers, thus relieving congestion on urban transit routes. In high-demand bus networks, urban transit demand presents imbalance of use of urban bus corridors. The demand patterns in both directions are asymmetric. In this paper, we develop a model which calculates the network and transportation costs in terms of wait time, in-vehicle travel time, and operator costs. We propose an integrated strategy, with an integrated limited-stop and short-turn line, by adjusting a variety of frequencies to meet the unbalanced and asymmetric demand. To minimize these costs, a model with a genetic algorithm can determine frequencies and the proper stations which can be skipped, as well as where turning back can occur, given an origin-destination trip matrix. Numerical examples are optimized to test the availability of an integrated service by minimizing the objective function, and the results are analyzed. Our results show that integrated service patterns can be adjusted to meet the demand under different conditions. In addition, the optimized schemes of an integrated service and the frequencies derived from the model can significantly reduce total cost.