Optimization in public transportation. Stop location, delay management and tariff zone design in a public transportation network (Q853492)

This book is a collection of recent results in three specific areas of public transportation problems and their optimization. 1. Stop location: The goal is to find a minimal number of stations (stops) to cover a certain demand region or to cover as many customers as possible (assuming a given budget) or both in a bicriteria scenario. Using the concepts of gauges a finite dominating set of candidates can be determined and the resulting set covering problem can be solved efficiently by exploiting its very special structure. 2. Delay management: Delays induce wait-depart decisions and their impact on the whole system is analyzed by means of mixed integer programs. Special cases are elaborated and solved efficiently minimizing the sum of delays of all passengers respectively of all vehicles or the number of missed connections -- again in a bicriteria setting, where Pareto optimal solutions are determined. 3. Tariff planning: The goal is to partition the whole demand region into zones and to determine prices for traveling through \(1,2,\dots, n\) zones, such that certain fairness criteria are fulfilled. The problems are formulated in terms of graph theory; algorithms based on clustering approaches, on greedy and on spanning tree approaches are utilized. They are compared on realistic data inputs and extended for specific real-world problems. Basic notations and results on integer programming, bicriteria optimization and gauges are compiled in an appendix; an extensive list of references is enclosed. In summary, this book is an interesting collection of material to three specific areas of public transportation systems. It contains a lot of models to map complex scenarios into precise mathematical optimization problems. Solving these problems usually is done by exploiting the special structure or by heuristics, which are fine tuned to the individual setting. A lot of experiments are reported and implementations for real-world applications are shown to be successful.